Co-Investigator
Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex
Benjamin K. Sovacool is Professor of Energy Policy at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the School of Business, Management, and Economics, part of the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom. There he serves as Director of the Sussex Energy Group and Director of the Center on Innovation and Energy Demand which involves the University of Oxford and the University of Manchester. He is a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), due to be published in 2022, and an Advisor on Energy to the European Commission’s Directorate General for Research and Innovation in Brussels, Belgium.
Professor Sovacool works as a researcher and consultant on issues pertaining to energy policy, energy security, climate change mitigation, and climate change adaptation. More specifically, his research focuses on renewable energy and energy efficiency, 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. With much coverage of his work in the international news media, he is one of the most highly-cited global researchers on issues bearing on controversies in energy and climate policy.
Digital Society
Fuel and transport poverty in the UK’s energy transition (FAIR)
- Diffusion of smart meters
- Expectations for automated vehicles (AVs)
- User perceptions of smart homes
- Teleworking and energy demand
Publications
- The energy use implications of 5G: Reviewing whole network operational energy, embodied energy, and indirect effects
- Mixed feelings: A review and research agenda for emotions in sustainability transitions
- Controllable, frightening, or fun? Exploring the gendered dynamics of smart home technology preferences in the United Kingdom
- Policy mixes for more sustainable smart home technologies
- Navigating implementation dilemmas in technology-forcing policies: A comparative analysis of accelerated smart meter diffusion in the Netherlands, UK, Norway, and Portugal (2000-2019)
- Global sustainability, innovation and governance dynamics of national smart electricity meter transitions
- The methodologies, geographies, and technologies of energy justice: A systematic and comparative review
- Reviewing the scope and thematic focus of 100,000 publications on energy consumption, services and social aspects of climate change: a big data approach to demand-side mitigation
- Beyond climate, culture and comfort in European preferences for low-carbon heat
- Humanizing heat as a service: Cost, creature comforts and the diversity of smart heating practices in the United Kingdom
- Exploring the role of failure in socio-technical transitions research
- New dimensions of vulnerability to energy and transport poverty
- From thermal comfort to conflict: The contested control and usage of domestic smart heating in the United Kingdom
- Testing smarter control and feedback with users: Time, temperature and space in household heating preferences and practices in a Living Laboratory
- Critically reviewing smart home technology applications and business models in Europe
- Culture and low-carbon energy transitions
- Imagining sustainable energy and mobility transitions: Valence, temporality, and radicalism in 38 visions of a low-carbon future
- Hot transformations: Governing rapid and deep household heating transitions in China, Denmark, Finland and the United Kingdom
- Smart home technologies in Europe: A critical review of concepts, benefits, risks and policies
- Temporality, vulnerability, and energy justice in household low carbon innovations
- Further reflections on vulnerability and resistance in the United Kingdom’s smart meter transition
- Transitions in energy efficiency and demand
- Of emergence, diffusion and impact: A socio-technical perspective on researching energy demand
- Mobility, food and housing: responsibility, individual consumption and demand-side policies in European deep decarbonisation pathways
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