In the next few decades, the International Energy Agency estimates that the people of Earth will spend $40 trillion to transition energy systems to carbon-neutral alternatives. What kinds of futures will people imagine and design? How will energy transitions be accomplished, managed, and governed? Whose voices will shape these transitions and the futures they create? How can we enhance the human outcomes of energy investments for people and societies around the globe? Can societies avoid the social and economic disruptions of technological changes in the energy sector?
Projects
- Imagining and Designing the Future of Energy and Society: In partnership with organizations such as QESST, ASU’s photovoltaics research center, and the US-Pakistan Centers for Advanced Studies in Energy, CES is working to develop tools and practices for exploring and informing the design of large-scale energy transitions and the kinds of future societies they will enable.
- Governing Energy Transitions: CES researchers are working with a wide array of partners to consider strategies for governing energy and climate innovation, including carbon dioxide removal and geoengineering technologies.
- Energy Policy Innovation: ASU’s Energy Policy Innovation Council is a national leader in advancing innovative policy solutions to the nation’s energy challenges and facilitating transitions to the utility of the future.
- Enhancing Urban Infrastructure Resilience: As part of the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network, CES researchers are working with cities throughout the Americas to enhance the resilience of interdependent energy, water, and other infrastructures to rapid climate change.
- Disruptive Energy Futures: CES is exploring how social and economic vulnerabilities to large-scale energy transitions, such as the end of fossil fuel use or the switch to transportation-as-a-service, can be identified, evaluated, planned for, and avoided.
- Taking Communities 100% Renewable: Working with diverse places from Tempe, AZ, to the islands of Hawaii and Puerto Rico, researchers at CES are building long-term partnerships to help communities plan and implement strategies for creating carbon-neutral futures.