An American Green Tech History Bibliography

In researching this book, I’ve run across a lot of great texts, both primary sources and academic scholarship. Most of the books listed here are considered important, but I’ve also peppered in some of the strange finds I’ve made at used bookstores up and down the West Coast. Over the next few months, I’ll be adding to and annotating this list.

The wondrous reach of the Internet combined with personal help from Peter Shulman at Case Western Reserve University, Thomas Andrews, Pamela Laird, and Myra Rich at the University of Colorado-Denver are largely responsible for the list of resources you see below. I’ve bolded those texts that strike me as a good (and interesting) starting places for other researchers.

If you have any suggestions for resources to add, send them my way. For more complete lists on oil and solar power, you might want to check out the bibliography at H-Net, Humanities and Social Sciences Online.

Thomas Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War, 2008

Peter Asmus, Reaping the Wind: How Mechanical Wizards, Visionaries, and Profiteers Helped Shape Our Energy Future, 2001

Devra Ruth Bachrach, Comparing the Risk Profiles of Renewable and Natural Gas Electricity Contracts, Berkeley Master’s Thesis, 2002

Galen Barbose, “Pursuing Energy Efficiency as a Hedge against Carbon Regulatory Risks: Current Resource Planning Practices in the West” for LBNL, 2008

Galen Barbose, “Reading the Tea Leaves: How Utilities in the West Are Managing Carbon Regulatory Risk in their Resource Plans” for LBNL, 2008

Donald Beattie, History and Overview of Solar Heat Technologies, 1997

Lori A. Bird, Brian Parsons, Troy Gagliano, Matthew H. Brown, Ryan H. Wiser, and Mark Bolinger, Factors driving wind power development in the United States for LBNL, 2003

Brian Black, Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom, 2000

Karl Bokenkamp, Hal LaFlash, Virinder Singh and Devra Bachrach Wang, “Hedging Carbon Risk: Protecting Customers and Shareholders from the Financial Risk Associated with Carbon Dioxide Emissions” in The Electricity Journal, 2005

Mark Bolinger and Ryan Wiser, Balancing Cost and Risk: The Treatment of Renewable Energy in Western Utility Resource Plans for the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 2005

Mark Bolinger, Ryan Wiser, and William Golove, Accounting for fuel price risk when comparing renewable to gas-fired generation: the role of forward natural gas prices in Energy Policy, 2006

Mark Bolinger, Ryan Wiser, and William Golove, “Quantifying the value that wind power provides as a hedge against volatile natural gas prices” for LBNL, 2002

Mark Bolinger, Ryan Wiser, and William Golove, ““Revisiting the “Buy versus Build” decision for publicly owned utilities in California considering wind and geothermal resources”” for LBNL, 2001

Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience, 1973

Giovanna Borasi and Mirko Zardini, curators, Sorry, Out of Gas: Architecture’s Response to the 1973 Oil Crisis, 2007

Michael Brower, Cool Energy: Renewable Solutions to Environmental Problems, 2002

Harrison Brown, The Challenge of Man’s Future, 1954… See Time Review.

Harrison Brown, The Next Hundred Years, 1966

Ken Butti and John Perlin, A Golden Thread: 2500 Years of Solar Architecture and Technology, 1980

S. Calvert, P. Goldman, and E. DeMeo, The EPRI/DOE Utility Wind Turbine Performance Verification Program, 1997

P.W. Carlin, A.S. Laxson, E.B. Muljadi, The History and State of the Art of Variable-Speed Wind Turbine Technology, 2001, 68-page PDF from NREL

Rick Clyne, Coal People, 1999

Victor Cohn, 1999: Our Hopeful Future, 1954

Paul Collins, “The Beautiful Possibility” in Cabinet Magazine, 2002

Barry Commoner, The Poverty of Power: Energy and the Economic Crisis, 1976

Kristen Eliza Coyne and Susan Ray, eds, Museum of Electricity and Magnetism at FSU

Farrington Daniels.  Direct Use of the Sun’s Energy, 1974

William Davenport and Melvin Kranzberg, eds, Technology and Culture: An Anthology, 1972

Clive Day, A History of Commerce, 1907

DOE, Assessing the Potential for Renewable Energy on Public Lands, 2003

DOE, Renewable Energy Technology Characterizations, 283 page PDF, 1997

DOE, Renewable Energy Data Book, 129 page PDF, 2008

DOE, Carbon Dioxide Emission Factors for Coal by the EIA, 1994

James Duke, Handbook of Energy Crops, 1983

Thomas Edison, The Diary and Observations, 1948

Northcutt Ely, “The Conservation of Oil” in The Harvard Law Review, 1938

Department of Energy, Alternative Fuels and Advanced Vehicles Data Center, data site

Enermodal Engineering, Cost Reduction Study for Solar Thermal Power Plants, for the World Bank, 1999

John Adolphus Etzler, The Paradise Within Reach of All Men, 1836, full text available

Leonard Fanning, The Rise of American Oil, 1936 (reprint: 1948)

David Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 2000

Edmund Fuller, Tinkers and Genius, 1955

Forrest Greg, SVO: Powering Your Vehicle with Straight Vegetable Oil, 2008

James D. Hamilton, “What is an Oil Shock?” in the Journal of Econometrics, 2003, 36 page PDF

Peter Hazell and R. K. Pachauri, “Bioenergy and agriculture: promises and challenges” for the International Food Policy Research Institute, 2006.

Leonard Hyman, America’s Electric Utilities: Past Present and Future, 1988

Iowa Energy Center, Bibliography of Wind Resources

Marcellus Jacobs, Experience with Wind Driven Electric Generating Plant, 1931-1957, 3 page PDF, UN Conference on New Sources of Energy, 1961

Eric Jarvis, Aquatic Species Program: Lessons Learned, 28 page PDF for NREL, 2008

Richard Kerr, “The Next Oil Crisis Looms Large — And Perhaps Close” in Science, 1998, 4 page PDF

Andy Kessler, How We Got Here, 2005, PDF available at link

Andrew Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism, 2007

David A. Kirsch, The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History,  2002

Gerhard Knothe, “Historical perspectives on vegetable oil-based diesel fuels,” 2001, 5 page PDF

Frank Laird, Solar Energy, Technology Policy, and Institutional Values, 2001

Gordon Laird, Power: Journeys Across an Energy Nation, 2002

Hans Landsberg, ed, Energy: The Next Twenty Years, A Report Sponsored by the Ford Foundation, 1979

Libby-Owens-Ford Glass Company, Your Solar Home, 1947

A. Lightner, Fuel from the Sky: Solar Power’s Potential for Western Energy Supply, for NREL, 2002

A. Lightner, B. Owens, Brighter than a Hundred Suns: Solar Power for the Southwest, for NREL, 2003

H. Lund, R. Nilsen, O. Salomatova, D. Skåre, E. Riisem, “The History High of Photovoltaic Cells”

Carol Lynn MacGregor, Boise, Idaho: 1882-1910, 2006

Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden

Christine Miller, “Wave and Tidal Energy Experiments in San Francisco and Santa Cruz” on the Western Neighborhoods Project, 2004

Christine Miller, “Wave Motors and Tide Machines at the Cliff House: 1886 to Present” on the Western Neighborhoods Project, 2003

Evan Mills, “The insurance and risk management industries: new players in the delivery of energy-efficient and renewable energy products and service” in Energy Policy, PDF, 2002

Jana Monji, “Miles by the Jolt” in Pasadena Weekly, 2006

Fred Morse, A Look at the US CSP Market,  a 15 page PDF, 2007

Lewis Mumford, The Lewis Mumford Reader, 1986

Jon Naar, Design for a Limited Planet.

Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China. 1954.

John Humphrey Noyes, Strange Cults and Utopias of 19th-Century America, 1870 (repub: 1966)

NREL, PV Manufacturing R&D (PVMaT) History

David Nye, Consuming Power

David Nye, Electrifying America

Fairfield Osborn, Our Plundered Planet, 1948

Greg Pahl, Biodiesel: Growing a New Energy Economy, 2005

PGK Panikar, “Oil: From Crisis to Crisis” in Economic and Political Weekly, 1991 (March 2-9)

John Perlin, From Space to Earth, 1999

John Perlin, “The Solar Cell Turns 50” at NREL, 2003

F. E. Powell, Windmills and Wind Motors, 1910 (reprint: 1985)

H. Price, D. Kearney, Parabolic-Trough Technology Roadmap: A Pathway for Sustained Commercial Development and Deployment of Parabolic-Trough Technology, for NREL, 1999

Carroll Pursell, The Machine in America, 1995

Palmer Cosslett Putnam, Power from the Wind, 1949

Palmer Cosslett Putnam, Energy in the Future, 1953

B. Pyadyshev, The Military-Industrial Complex of the USA, 1977

M. Ragheb, Historical Wind Generator Machines, 2009

Charles Reich, The Greening of America, 1970

Robert Righter, Wind Energy in America, 1996

Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 2001

Joseph Romm, “The technology that will save the world” in Salon, 2008

Euclid A. Rose, “OPEC’s Dominance of the Global Oil Market: The Rise of World Dependency on Oil” in Middle East Journal, 2004 (Summer)

Sargent & Lundy LLC, Assessment of Parabolic Trough and Power Tower Solar Technology Cost and Performance Forecasts, for NREL, 2003

J. Sheehan, et al, A Look Back at the US Department of Energy’s Aquatic Species Program — Biodiesel from Algae, for NREL 1998

W. Short, DJ Packey, and T. Holt, A Manual for the Economic Evaluation of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Technologies for NREL, 2005

Isabel Schnabel and Hyun Song Sin, “Liquidity and Contagion: The Crisis of 1763″ in the Journal of the European Economic Association, 2004 (December)

Vaclav Smil, Energy at the Crossroads, 2003

Vaclav Smil, Energies, 1998

Alex Steffen, ed, Worldchanging, 2006

L. Stoddard, J. Abiecunas, R. O’Connell, Economic, Energy, and Environmental Benefits of Concentrating Solar Power in California, a report for NREL, 2006

Steven Stoll, The Great Delusion, 2008

Armen Tashchian, Mark E. Slama and Roobian O. Tashchian, “Measuring Attitudes toward Energy Conservation: Cynicism, Belief in Material Growth, and Faith in Technology” in Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, 1984

Ian Theaker, et al, Santa Monica Green Building Guidelines, 1994

Abbott Payson Usher, A History of Mechanical Inventions, 1954

C.J. Waag and S.H. Wood, Geothermal Investigations in Idaho, 1987, 168-page PDF

Daniel Wallace, ed, Energy We Can Live With, 1976

Y. Wan and BK Parsons, Factors Relevant to Utility Integration of Intermittent Renewable Technologies for NREL, 1993

Spencer Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming at the American Institute for Physics website, 2001+

Mara Wilkins, “The Oil Companies in Perspective” in Daedalus, 1975

Ryan Wiser and S. Pickle, Financing Investments in Renewable Energy: The Role of Policy Design and Restructuring for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1997

Image: Library of Congress, DN-0004751, Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago Historical Society.

Inventing Green by Alexis Madrigal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.