Knowledge Controversies and Renewable Energy Transition: Exploring Science and Policy Debates
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation explores controversies arising from policies to promote a transition to greater reliance on wind and solar power in Ontario, Canada. Drawing on conceptual frameworks from science and technology studies (STS), human geography and socio-technical transition studies, it provides new insights into the dynamics and impact of debates over the cost and environmental impacts of “new” renewable energies, as well as the role and nature of social resistance in the context of emergent concepts of energy democracy. This dissertation comprises three standalone articles (chapters 3-5). Chapter 3 uses rhetorical analysis to explore how scientific facts about wind energy’s impact on human health were co-produced by the science and policy processes. It suggests the wind and health controversy cannot be definitively settled by science because it is inextricably tied to value-based questions about how precautionary wind development should be, what should count as a valid health issue, and what constitutes valid evidence in health research and public policy. Chapter 4 explores how the (in)visibility of different causal frames of the issue of rising electricity prices was mediated through a decade of newspaper coverage in Ontario. It demonstrates how coverage framed the issue of rising electricity prices overwhelmingly as a consequence of the Green Energy and Green Economy Act, 2009, amplifying criticisms of its design and impact on consumers and the economy while diminishing the visibility of other key cost-related factors. Chapter 5 presents a comparative assessment of normative and relational frameworks of energy democracy and their different accounts of resistant publics in energy transitions. It finds normative understandings constrain imaginings of low-carbon energy futures and who legitimately participates in democracy, overlooking uncertainties and complexities inherent to transitions and their publics. Relational approaches address these shortcomings through greater attention to how energy problems and solutions are framed, how political action is performed through the articulation of contested issues, and who is disenfranchised in transition processes. Findings highlight the importance of studying in-depth the co-production and mediation of knowledge and how publics struggle to gain political authority over issues that affect them when investigating trajectories and outcomes of renewable energy transitions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.059 | 0.052 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.161 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.035 | 0.031 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".