In a comment below, Vinay recommends Power To The People as "basically a much less technical take on the decentralized energy infrastructure thing - kind of Small Is Profitable For Beginners." The book's been getting a lot of buzz, and Vinay's got a sharp eye, so I'd think it's worth picking up.
Michelle Nijhuis also reviews it favorably:
"Journalist Vijay Vaitheeswaran, a longtime correspondent for The Economist magazine, is far from a knee-jerk environmentalist. But in his new book, Power to the People, he argues that pork-laden measures like the stalled U.S. energy bill are both environmentally and economically wrongheaded. Subsidies for dirty energy sources, he says, not only have the obvious effect of encouraging pollution but also obscure the numerous advantages of cleaner, more efficient technologies. Instead of competing for more government dollars for their favorite clean-energy source, he says, environmentalists could and should make free markets work for the planet. "Markets cannot do everything," Vaitheeswaran writes, "but encouraging efficiency is one thing they are extremely good at."
