Pardee Center to Host Special Lecture on Affordable and Just Energy Access

The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future will host a special lecture titled “New Paradigms for Delivering Affordable and Just Energy Access: Insights from the Social Sciences” with Prof. Benjamin Sovacool on Thursday, July 14 from 5:30 to 7:00 pm at the Metcalf Trustee Center.

Prof. Sovacool will discuss how small-scale renewable energy technologies, such as solar panels, cookstoves, biogas digesters, microhydro units, and wind turbines, are helping planners eradicate energy poverty and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He will highlight the applicability of different approaches to the promotion of renewable energy in developing countries with an in-depth exploration of case studies in Bangladesh, China, India, Laos, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, and Sri Lanka. He will also demonstrate how household and commercial innovations occur (or fail to occur) within particular energy governance regimes. Lastly, he will explore successful case studies alongside failures or “worst practice” examples that are often just as revealing as those that met their targets. Based on these successes and failures, he will present salient lessons for researchers and planners wishing to expand energy access and raise standards of living in some of the world’s poorest communities.

The lecture is the keynote address of a three-day workshop on sustainable energy futures in developing countries hosted by the Pardee Center and convened by post-doctoral associate Laurence Delina.

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Speaker Biography

Prof. 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 also Director of the Center for Energy Technologies and Professor of Business and Social Sciences in the Department of Business Development and Technology at Aarhus University in Denmark. Professor Sovacool is the author of more than 300 refereed articles, book chapters, and reports, and the author, coauthor, editor, or coeditor of 18 books on energy and climate change topics, including those with MIT Press, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, and the Nature Publishing Group/Palgrave.  He has received or managed large competitive grants from the U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. National Science Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, NordForsk, Energy Technology Development and Demonstration Program of Denmark, and the Danish Council for Independent Research.