By exploring issues of energy, efficiency, growth and systemic resets, the reader is able to see the trajectory humanity is currently on and how it needs to change in order to survive and thrive moving forwards.

This chapter looks at the most recent climate science and starkly sets out the severity of the problems ahead. It gives the reader all the knowledge needed to broadly understand the critical issues of our day from a technical perspective, including systems of production and consumption for energy and food, biodiversity loss, pollution (including plastics), disease threats and population levels. It then looks at ways in which we can technically transfer to a sustainable way of living.

This case study explores the State Grid Corporation of China’s (SGCC’s) localization strategies within the Belo Monte hydroelectric project in Brazil, highlighting the challenges and lessons learned by Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) as they expand into Latin America. Over recent decades, Chinese SOEs have emerged as potential collaborators for Latin American countries seeking investment and technology for critical infrastructure projects. SGCC’s involvement in constructing the Xingu-Estreito transmission line for the Belo Monte project stands as a prime example. This line, among the world’s largest and first to implement ±800kV ultra-high-voltage technology outside China, marks not only an engineering triumph for SGCC but also a significant business and legal accomplishment. The company adeptly navigated Brazil’s complex legal environment, tackling multifaceted regulatory, financial, and environmental challenges. This case study, based on government and corporate documents as well as confidential interviews, examines SGCC’s strategies for procurement, financial structuring, environmental licensing, and operational management in the context of this grandiose transmission line.

This chapter begins with the sombre matter of world destruction. Almost by definition, the fully artificial worlds described in this book are ontologically fragile. They can be pulled apart or undone, as easily or more easily than they were put together. Whether they are replaced by a natural world of power politics involving different ethnic groups or whether no more than chaos and disorder can be expected in such a scenario is no doubt an important question, but it does not affect the real possibility of world destruction. This chapter argues for an alternative to hegemonic wars and the threat of nuclear annihilation, an alternative to be sought in the dynamics of world building. Today competition between the superpowers is organised around the capacity to build new technological worlds; those unable to compete must eventually become elements in a world built by others. The emergence of these artificial worlds opens up possibilities for state actors to change the global power distribution without the risks arising from direct action against their rivals. In Ukraine, while Russia seems determined to bring the current world order tumbling down, it also has to face the full brunt of that world order’s power in a succession of system wars ranging from a new form of technological warfare to the uses and abuses of the global energy, financial and trade systems.

This chapter outlines Hopkins’s knowledge of contemporary energy physics as it decisively shapes his distinctive poetry and the metaphysic that undergirds it. The discussion begins with Hopkins’s appreciation of meteorology in his ‘Heraclitean Fire’ sonnet, of the earth’s atmosphere as a vast thermodynamic system. The figure that this poem presents of man as a lonely ‘spark,’ and the pyrotechnics of ‘As kingfishers catch fire,’ ‘The Windhover’ and ‘God’s Grandeur,’ are then glossed through the optical application of the energy concept in spectroscopy. Finally the chapter considers field theory and Clerk Maxwell’s reassessment of the Newtonian principle of force through the energy concept as the distributive principle of stress, tracing Hopkins’s use of this physical concept in his writings on mechanics, nature and most momentously in the definitive formulation of his metaphysic of stress, instress ,and inscape in 1868 and the concurrent advent of his metrical principle of Sprung Rhythm.

This chapter adopts an Anthropocene framework to contextualize Gerard Manley Hopkins. Placing his work within the epoch of human geophysical agency, I argue, affords new perspective on his radical contribution as an ecological witness. It allows us to see that Hopkins’s depictions of natural entities involved an intuition about their embeddedness in larger systems, many inchoately explained by contemporary science; that his representations of non-human nature seldom avoided the ‘anthropos’ (the ‘human’ in Anthropocene), whether as destructive interloper or divinely privileged steward; and that his life and work included moments of prescience about human activity interfering with Earth-system processes. To recontextualize Hopkins thus is to furnish different ways to interpret his work (in wider conceptual networks and deeper time horizons) and to animate that work’s reception (in light of present concerns). It is also to affiliate Hopkins with ecopoets whose formal innovations might be fruitfully juxtaposed with his poetics.

The introductory chapter is a brief recap on the history and origins of wind power, from windmills in ancient times to today’s multi-megawatt turbines. Energy security has arguably been the historic driver for wind power, and it was a primary source of mechanical power until the advent of the Industrial revolution when it was superceded by coal and oil. The first electricity generating wind turbines were built in the late nineteenth centry, and the technology was pursued most vigorously in Denmark, a country with limited energy reserves: the role of this country in creating the modern wind turbine is described. The worldwide energy crisis of the 1970s brought wind power into the frame internationally, and the pivotal role of legislation under President Carter in expanding the market for wind energy in the US and elsewhere is outlined. Since then the rationale for wind power has expanded to include climate change and the technology has grown exponentially in terms of global installation of wind power and the physical size of wind turbines. The chapter concludes by introducing some of the technological steps that have enabled this process, and which are detailed in subsequent chapters.

Chapter 4 extends the aerodynamic discussions of Chapter 3 to show how the rotor net loads (power, thrust, and torque) are developed. The dimensionless power coefficient (Cp) curve is introduced, and the relationship between rotor tip speed ratio and optimum solidity is explained. The variation of thrust loading with wind speed on an ideal pitch-controlled rotor is explained from simple theory, and illustrated with measurements from a full-scale turbine. Equations governing the chord and twist distributions for an optimised blade are given and discussed in the context of some historic blade types, with illustrations. Rotor aerodynamic control is explained with reference to fixed-pitch stall regulation and variable blade pitch (both positive and negative). The influence of blade number is examined, with discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of one-, two-, and three-bladed wind turbines. The method by which annual energy capture is derived from the power curve and wind speed distribution is explained, with example. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of alternative aerodynamic control devices including tip vanes and ailerons, and downwind rotors (with examples).

Can ‘digitalisation’ (the process of running business through procedures that take place in digital format) contribute to the green transition? If so, to what extent? The European Union (EU) has recently embraced the idea of synergically combining climate policies and digitalisation, whereby the digital transformation becomes a key tool to achieve net zero carbon emissions. Arguably, while there are manifold advantages in improving, for instance, energy distribution via smart grids, digitalisation also contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. It is therefore necessary to strike the right balance and understand how to best harness digitalisation to implement the green transition. Notably, it is essential that the EU monitor the impact of digitalisation on the overall energy demand to avoid an excessive increase in energy consumption. Arguably, the EU can profitably couple a holistic embracement of digitalisation as the panacea to climate challenges with a ‘learn-by-doing’ approach, setting a variety of real-world experiments across supply chains to test the viability of its digital policy, in close collaboration with stakeholders.

In June 2020, the German Federal Government adopted its National Hydrogen Strategy (NWS), which was updated in July 2023, viewing green hydrogen as a key to the energy transition. To achieve net greenhouse gas neutrality by 2045, as required by law, the NWS envisages a rapid market ramp-up for hydrogen. This policy is supported by the recent amendment of the Energy Industry Act (EnWG), which introduces provisions for a prompt creation of a so-called hydrogen core network. However, for now, the required infrastructure does not exist. Against that background, this chapter will examine the existing permission regime in Germany for pure hydrogen infrastructure, specifically its transportation via pipelines and its large-scale storage in salt caverns as the best short-term storage option. The analytical focus will be trained on existing legal barriers that stand in the way of accelerating the construction and repurposing of infrastructure to disseminate hydrogen. To secure the planning and approval framework for the rapid expansion of hydrogen infrastructures in Germany, necessary adjustments to the current legal framework are proposed.

What happens when we read the Irish literary canon for energy? We find numerous mentions of wind power, solar power, petrol, coal, peat, gas, and dung, and we find these energy resources and infrastructures trellised into plot lines and character arcs in some unexpected ways in Irish literature, from Joyce and Beckett to Heaney and McCormack. What emerges is a partial but suggestive cognitive map – of Irish energy economies, ecologies, and phenomenologies – that reveals Ireland’s unique energy signature and at the same time links Ireland to other imperial and global regimes of petromodernity.