ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the demise of renewable energy as a social movement, conveniently establishing the division between the "counter culture" movement and the arrival of the "corporate culture" project. As a problem of technology and society, renewable energy may have been promulgated by the counter culture as being 'closer to the earth', but for the most part it promised environmentalism of a modern kind. The counter culture invested socially transformative power in the technology of renewable energy and gave less attention than it should have to the role of culture in creating, spreading, and developing technologies. Scaling up renewable energy technologies to meet the demands of a conventional energy system has not been very successful for most sources. Renewable energy has its place in the conventional energy system, such as wind farms and building-integrated photovoltaic, but technologically it is a long way from meeting the primary energy needs of the developed world.
