Benjamin K. Sovacool

Dr. Benjamin K. Sovacool is a Visiting Associate Professor at Vermont Law School, where he manages the Energy Security and Justice Program at their Institute for Energy & the Environment. Professor Sovacool works as a researcher and consultant on issues pertaining to renewable electricity generators and distributed generation, the politics of large-scale energy infrastructure, designing public policy to improve energy security and access to electricity, and building adaptive capacity to the consequences of climate change. He is a Contributing Author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) forthcoming Fifth Assessment (AR5).

At the National University of Singapore, he led a series of research projects supported by the MacArthur Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation investigating how to improve energy security for impoverished rural communities in Bangladesh, China, India, Laos, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, and Sri Lanka. With a grant from the Singaporean Ministry of Education, he also explored how to improve resilience to the impacts of climate change in twelve major metropolitan areas (including cities in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia) in addition to the evaluation of national adaptation projects in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, the Maldives, Nepal, and Vanuatu. He has consulted for the Asian Development Bank, United Nations Development Program, and United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific on energy poverty, governance, and security issues. He has also served in 2012 as an Erasmus Mundus Visiting Scholar at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, where he researched energy security issues for the European Union.

Before then, Professor Sovacool worked on a large grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation's Electric Power Networks Efficiency and Security Program analyzing the barriers to small-scale renewable electricity sources and distributed generation in the United States. He assessed the renewable resource potential of Virginia in conjunction with the Virginia Center for Coal and Energy Research and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Domestically, he has served in research and advisory capacities for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Semiconductor Materials and Equipment International, U.S. Department of Energy's Climate Change Technology Program, the Global Environment Facility, the World Bank Group, and the Union of Concerned Scientists. Internationally, he has done the same for the International Institute for Applied Systems and Analysis (IIASA) near Vienna, Austria, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Geneva, Switzerland, the Renewable Energy Network for the Twenty-First Century (REN 21) in Paris, France, and the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris, France.

Dr. Sovacool has published more than 170 academic articles and presented research at more than 80 international conferences and symposia. Although his primary area of expertise is energy policy, he has also published in the fields of astronomy, bioethics, chemical engineering, environmental law, epidemiology, fisheries, forest management, geography, governance, political economy, political science, public policy and administration, science and technology studies, sociology, and technology transfer.

He is the co-editor of Energy and American Society (Springer, 2007) and the editor, author, or co-author of The Dirty Energy Dilemma (Praeger, 2008), Powering the Green Economy (2009, Earthscan), The Routledge Handbook of Energy Security (Routledge, 2010), Contesting the Future of Nuclear Power (World Scientific, 2011), Climate Change and Global Energy Security (MIT Press, 2011), The National Politics of Nuclear Power (Routledge, 2012), The Governance of Small-Scale Renewable Energy in Developing Asia (Ashgate, 2012), and The Governance of Energy Megaprojects: Politics, Hubris, and Energy Security (Edward Elgar, 2013). His books have been nominated for eleven international prizes, and his Dirty Energy Dilemma won a 2009 Nautilus Silver Award. His opinion editorials have appeared in newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and the San Francisco Chronicle.

He received his PhD in science and technology studies from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University in Blacksburg, Virginia. His e-mail address is sovacool@vt.edu.

Dr. Sovacool is happy to be contacted via email for requests for any of his articles and publications.