Energy services are a fundamental human need and are thus indispensable for human well-being. Inadequate access to safe, clean and affordable energy is closely linked to a range of social concerns, including reduced economic and social opportunities contributing to poverty, poor health, and reduced educational attainment, particularly for women. Nevertheless, humankind faces many important energy challenges that go beyond questions of “energy poverty” alone. These can be characterized as challenges resulting from either “too little” to “too much”: too little access to modern energy services for the poor, too little investment in energy RD&D and infrastructure, and too little cheap and accessible crude oil; too much energy-related pollutant emissions, too much market volatility and risk to supply arising from too much dependence on relatively few geological deposits vulnerable to geopolitical threats. All of these energy challenges and many more need to be addressed simultaneously, in all likelihood requiring a fundamental transition throughout the world’s energy systems. This transition is likely to take the better part of the 21st century.

The overall objective of IIASA’s new Energy Program, initiated in March 2006, is to better understand the nature of alternative future energy transitions, their implications for human well-being and the environment and how they might be shaped and directed by current and future decision makers. Decisions made today and in the near future are sowing the seeds that will determine which of the range of alternative energy development paths are followed over the century, which paths are promoted and which hindered. Given the interactions between energy and almost all economic and social activities, it is imperative to better understand the long-term implications of alternative energy policies, investments and technological developments now.

The ENE Program will contribute to addressing the challenges confronting the global energy system by pursuing three main areas of research:

1. Coordinating a Global Energy Assessment that will evaluate the social, economic, development, technological, environmental, security and other issues linked to energy to provide the technical and scientific basis needed to address the major energy challenges of tomorrow, related to: access to modern forms of energy; security of supply; local, regional and global environmental impacts; and securing sufficient investment; 
2. Developing new methods and modeling techniques for exploring alternative energy pathways, with a focus on the “next generation” of both systems-engineering and other modeling approaches; and
3. Longer-term research, informed by (1) and (2), on energy investment requirements looking at the development, deployment and financing needs and opportunities associated with a range of energy technologies, systems and infrastructures in a more dynamic context.

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Last updated: 15 Jan 2011