Peter Yang

Peter Yang is an accomplished author, editor, researcher, and teacher in Sustainable Development, Renewable Energy, and German Studies. He is the author (and editor) of eight books and around 100 journal articles, book chapters, and book and film reviews.

His current research focuses on climate change, climate action, and, more specifically, the renewable energy-based transformation of the fossil fuel-based economy. His energy-related research interests include Sustainable Development Goals, challenges, and solutions of renewable energy technologies, grid integration, energy storage; energy efficiency in transportation and buildings; R&D of renewable energy technologies; and the teaching, training, and public education of renewable energy transformation.

His most recent research accomplishments include a well-read book Renewable Energy: Challenges and Solutions published by Springer Nature in 2024. This book provides the most recent advancements in renewable energy technologies, investigates the hurdles to renewable energy penetration, and explores urgently needed yet possible technological, political, socioeconomic, and financial solutions to these challenges.

As a research professor specializing in international economics in China, he published in that capacity on the country's early economic reform policies and strategies. He proposed, among other reform policies, the reform of its Value Added Tax (VAT) as a major step toward a market-oriented economic system.

As a professor at the Case Western Reserve University, USA, he has a multidisciplinary teaching and research trajectory in Energy Transition, Environmental and Climate Protection Policy, Transformation to Sustainable Development, Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency, Renewable Energy and Energy Storage Technologies, and German and Chinese Studies.

His earlier research focused on the causes of climate change in major economies and their actions to mitigate CO2 emissions and the development of renewable energy and energy-efficiency technologies. Those research projects include the environmental and ecological impact of carbon-based energy production and consumption in major economics; investment, installation, and consumption of renewable energy technologies; and renewable energy promotion policies and regulations, such as Sustainable Development Goals, renewable energy targets, carbon reduction targets, feed-in tariffs, fuel taxes, and carbon taxes. These projects resulted in three books, Cases on Renewable Energy and Sustainable Development (IGI-Global, 2019), Rolling Back the Tide of Climate Change: Renewable Solutions and Policy Instruments in the U.S.A and China (Green Economics, 2015), and Renewables Are Getting Cheaper (Green Economics, 2016) and many refereed journal papers, book chapters, book reviews, and conference papers.

Before he published the four books in Energy Transition and Sustainable Development, he had also published four books in German Studies.

Two of which were written in German, such as German textbooks Modern German Plays: An Advanced German Textbook (focusing on literary study) and Deutsch durch Schauspiele: An Intermediate German Text (focusing on language learning) that utilize some of the most famous modern German plays, i.e., The Three-Penny Opera and Caucasian Chalk Circle by Brecht, The Devil's General by Zuckmayer, The Chinese Wall by Frisch, Visit by Durrenmatt, A Sports Play by Jelinek, and Innocence by Loher, to teach German language, culture, and literature. Pedagogically, these textbooks combine the use of communicative approach and three-stage reading strategy to enhance the German students' German reading, speaking, writing, and communicative skills.

The other two were monographs in German drama, one written in German on Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Calk Circle (Theater ist Theater, Peter Lang, 1998) and the other written in English on Max Frisch’s The Chinese Wall (Play is Play, University Press of America, 2000).