Dr Sarah Knuth sarah.e.knuth@durham.ac.uk
Associate Professor
Reimagining energy infrastructures for the 21st century increasingly means choosing between competing economic futures, a dilemma that is now provoking conflicts across many places and realms. In the United States, one critical clash is unfolding among tech sector advocates for a clean energy transition, as U.S. cleantech has worked to regroup from Silicon Valley’s failed clean energy manufacturing push of the late 2000s and to navigate an ongoing solar trade war with China: about what that transition might look like, how it might be achieved, and, critically, what economic sectors and rents might emerge from it. One set of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists argues that “breakthrough” clean energy technologies are needed to produce an energy transition and to bolster U.S. economic power into the 21st century. Meanwhile, a competing set prioritizes deploying existing technologies and infrastructures at scale. The latter argues that new kinds of innovation can accomplish this task, and in the process defend embattled U.S. hegemony: notably, so-called financial innovation, and new articulations between finance and high tech. This debate has major implications for the nature and global politics of a green economy.
Knuth, S. (2018). “Breakthroughs” for a Green Economy? Financialization and Clean Energy Transition. Energy Research and Social Science, 41, 220-229. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2018.04.024
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Apr 12, 2018 |
Online Publication Date | May 5, 2018 |
Publication Date | Jul 1, 2018 |
Deposit Date | May 1, 2018 |
Publicly Available Date | May 5, 2019 |
Journal | Energy Research and Social Science |
Electronic ISSN | 2214-6296 |
Publisher | Elsevier |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 41 |
Pages | 220-229 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2018.04.024 |
Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1332155 |
Accepted Journal Article
(309 Kb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Copyright Statement
© 2018 This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
New Political Ecologies of Renewable Energy
(2022)
Journal Article
Rentiers of the low-carbon economy? Renewable energy's extractive fiscal geographies
(2021)
Journal Article
Thirty states of renewability: Controversial energies and the politics of incumbent industry
(2021)
Journal Article
Urban real estate technologies: genealogies, frontiers, & critiques
(2020)
Journal Article
About Durham Research Online (DRO)
Administrator e-mail: dro.admin@durham.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2025
Advanced Search