Benjamin Sovacool

Director, IGS; Professor, Earth & Environment, College of Arts & Sciences

Benjamin K. Sovacool, Director of the Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS), is a Professor in the Department of Earth & Environment. He works as a researcher and consultant on issues pertaining to global energy policy and politics, energy security, energy justice, 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, the ethics and justice of energy, and building adaptive capacity to the consequences of climate change.

His research has been endorsed by U.S. President Bill Clinton, the Prime Minister of Norway Gro Harlem Brundtland, and the late Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom, among others. He was a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), published in 2022, and an Advisor on Energy to the European Commission’s Directorate General for Research and Innovation in Brussels, Belgium.

Sovacool has played a leadership role in winning collaborative research grants worth more than $28.2 million in directly managed funds, including those from the U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. National Science Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Energy Technology Development and Demonstration Program of Denmark, the Danish Council for Independent Research, the European Commission and the European Research Council. In the United Kingdom, he has served as a Principal Investigator on projects funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, Natural Environment Research Council, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

He is the recipient of multiple national and international awards and honors, including the “Distinguished Graduate Alumni Achievement Award” from his Alma Mater Virginia Tech, the 2019 USERN Prize for his work on “Social Justice in an Era of Climate Change and Energy Scarcity,” the “Dedication to Justice Award” given by the American Bar Association, and a “Distinguished Visiting Energy Professorship” at the Environmental Law Center at Vermont Law School. He is also an Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences in the United Kingdom.

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.

Publications

Research Projects

Advancing Transformational Energy Justice Across the Renewable Energy Supply Chain
Source: Sloan Foundation
Summary: This project utilizes a place-based approach to examining the justice implications of renewable energy production at multiple scales and across lifecycle stages, with clear implications for policy. It asks: What equity and justice issues are associated with solar and wind energy transitions across their supply chain in the United States? What community vulnerabilities emerge related to mineral extraction and manufacturing? Moreover, what energy equity and justice issues may arise related to permitting and use in rural communities, and with disposal and waste? Relatedly, what potential policy remedies exist to minimize negative impacts across mineral extraction, manufacturing, permitting and use, and disposal and waste? The project will include both eight case studies and the use of mixed research methods across multiple scales of renewable energy production for both solar and wind energy. Guiding this empirical data collection, the conceptual framework will be grounded in feminist, Indigenous, and anti-racist energy systems as well as whole systems justice. The project aims to contribute to scholarship and enhance theory and understanding across disciplines on the equity dimensions of energy transitions. Ultimately, the research team led by IGS Director Benjamin Sovacool will translate the broader impacts of its research findings into actionable considerations and guidance for local communities, states, Tribes, and national governments to steer renewable energy transitions onto more just and equitable paths.

L2D: Limits to Digitalization
Source: Research Council of Norway
Summary: Norway faces shifts from energy surplus to deficit and rising household consumption, as emerging industries (data centers, hydrogen, battery production) compete for energy. The transition’s implications are accentuated by digitalization – the reliance on digital technologies for understanding and action. Digitalization underpins Norwegian sustainability policy, promising petroleum decoupling, upholding the welfare state, and structuring civic participation and social interaction; it is also seen as a force for global sustainability. Yet, its benefits are seldom weighed against the energy, material, and local impacts of digital infrastructures. Limits to digitalization (L2D) addresses this gap by studying data centers, central to national policy, but steeped in controversies and uncertainties. Supporting energy and digital “Twin Transitions” while recognizing ecological finitude, L2D probes the need, and options, for socio-environmental limits to the digital. Through this project led by NTNU Social Research (NSR) in collaboration with Boston University (Dr. Ayse Coskun and Dr. Benjamin Sovacool), the research team will consider energy transitions’ socioenvironmental impacts via Norwegian data centers and the ongoing attempt by Norway to become a global hub for digital infrastructure, justified with reference to digitalization’s benefits. In the process, L2D aims to assist Norwegian decision-makers at all levels in efficiently governing the trade-offs around data center construction.

Media Commentary

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IGS Affiliations: Executive Leadership, Faculty, and Leadership

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