This chapter develops the economics theory of demonstration projects and then investigates the role of one demonstration project – the Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design – at lowering information barriers for the adoption of innovative energy and environmental technologies. The KBISD demonstration project allows us to observe the formation of a network around a demonstration project and how attitudes and behaviors relating to environmental technologies permeate and disseminate throughout the network. This section presents results from an industry-wide survey as well as several dozen semi-structured interviews related to the KBISD. The interviews reveal motivations, challenges, innovations, costs, and risks associated with participation in a demonstration project, as well as key differences between this living building approach and design–bid–build approaches often employed in traditional buildings.It finds that, while working on the building was not affiliated with increased levels of technology familiarity prior to building construction, being affiliated with the US Green Building Council is highly correlated with increased knowledge of emergent technologies. This points to professional knowledge networks as having a key role in disseminating information regarding emergent technologies.

This chapter develops a theory to explain how demonstration projects can help facilitate transformation in the marketplace. This theory is based primarily on a single economic concept: The costs of acquiring and utilizing new information. Understanding the role that pilot and demonstration projects can play in disseminating information is crucial to understanding the prospects for market transformation. These information flows occur both on the supply side and demand side of the (building) technologies market. This chapter details how information flows across supply networks and throughout markets can eventually shift standard operating practices, though these results are hardly guaranteed. We speculate that geographic networks and communities of practice are largely responsible for leveraging information spillovers, lowering costs, and facilitating dissemination of innovative technologies.

This chapter introduces a theory of Green Market Transformation, where emergent energy and environmental technologies gain widespread adoption in the marketplace. It articulatea a number of mechanisms that reduce transaction costs and disseminate information across the marketplace, such as building supply chains and improving demand for nascent technologies. Further, it reviews the global, European, and US uptake of ecolabeled buildings, providing evidence of the impact of the Green Building Movement. By providing examples of prominent ecolabeled buildings, it explores the motivations for ecolabel adoption and argues that firms and organizations compete to build ever-greener buildings. This competitive dynamic is evident across sports stadiums, where the authors detail a series of incremental improvements to stadiums over time.

It is not just economics and technology but stakeholder interests which have shaped the evolution of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology as an option with a portfolio of low-carbon technologies. We trace how over the course of the 2000s, CCS went from largely unknown to being seen as a flexible, dispatchable technology applicable to coal, gas or biomass, which could address concerns over security of supply with minimal disruption to the existing power system and business models while addressing hard-to-abate sectors including heat and process industries. Four general themes are identified as explaining why the politics of CCS has been so difficult: (i) there is no pressure for politicians or other stakeholders to seek more efficient solutions; (ii) the lack of a coherent logic or overarching industrial policy narrative for supporting CCS, except perhaps in a few isolated locations; (iii) the nature of CCS requires a much larger initial investment and greater systems integration than other low-carbon options; and (iv) changing energy industry business models, which, over the past decade, had eroded some of the factors that had worked in favour of CCS.

In this chapter, we discuss the evolution of the field of ‘ethics of nuclear energy’, regarding its past, present and future. We will first review the history of this field in the previous four decades, focusing on new and emerging challenges of nuclear energy production and waste disposal, in light of several important developments. Four of the most pressing ethical challenges will be further reviewed in the chapter. First, what is a morally ‘acceptable’ nuclear energy production method, if we consider the existing and possible new technologies? Second, provided a new tendency to consider nuclear waste disposal with several countries, what would be the new ethical and governance challenges of these multinational collaborations? Third, how should we deal with the (safety) challenges of the new geographic distribution of nuclear energy, tilting towards emerging economies with less experience with nuclear technology? Fourth, nuclear energy projects engender highly emotional controversies. Neither ignoring the emotions of the public nor taking them as a reason to prohibit or restrict a technology – we call them technocratic populist pitfalls respectively – seem to be able to guide responsible policy making.