Grantham Seminar | The Nordic low-carbon energy transition: insights for the United Kingdom

The five Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden have aggressive climate and energy policies in place and have already emerged to be leaders in renewable energy. Denmark is renowned for its pioneering use of wind energy, Finland and Sweden bioenergy, Norway hydroelectricity and Iceland geothermal.  This presentation investigates the technological and policy pathways necessary for these five countries to achieve their low carbon goals. It argues that a concerted effort must be made to (1) promote renewable forms of electricity including bioenergy, wind energy, hydroelectricity, geothermal and solar; (2) shift to more sustainable forms of transport such as electric vehicles and biofuel; (3) further improve the energy efficiency of buildings; and (4) adopt carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies for industry. It concludes with implications for what such transition pathways mean for both energy researchers and energy planners.

Prof. Dr. 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 Centre on Innovation and Energy Demand which involves the University of Oxford and the University of Manchester. He is also Director of the Centre 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.