From oil exploration to alternative fuels, from climate change to energy markets, the world faces immense energy policy challenges that are growing more complex and urgent with each passing year. Harvard faculty at the Kennedy School, the School of Public Health, the Business School, and the Law School span the range of knowledge and resources necessary to examine these questions and identify possible responses.

Energy and Security

Energy and security concerns intersect in the areas of nuclear energy and proliferation, the Middle East and oil security, competition for resources, and the globalization of energy markets.

Energy and the Environment

There is virtually no energy activity that does not have material environmental impacts. Climate change presents a variety of requirements and opportunities for development of better policies. But policies must be developed in a challenging context of large externalities, long horizons, major uncertainties, concentrated costs, dispersed benefits, and conflicting values.

Energy Regulation and Infrastructure

Energy industries are rife with real or perceived monopolies and operate at scales that make them of first-order interest to government. The economic regulation of infrastructure, especially for electric and gas networks, presents policy challenges in market design and in managing regulation in support of markets. Taxation of energy and extractive industries has impacts for fiscal policy, environmental policy, and the development of industry.

Energy and Economic Development

Rapidly-growing economies such as those of China and India face intense and growing energy needs. For countries with abundant natural energy resources, the "resource curse" can stymie development. Governments and businesses must tackle the difficult task of balancing taxation and populism without killing the golden goose.

Technological Innovation in Energy and Transportation

Technological innovations in energy efficiency and production can have major economic and environmental impacts. A substantial challenge for energy policy is to accelerate the use of advanced technologies for new long-lived energy investment, especially the booming investment expected in the developing world.  Harvard researchers are examining the conditions that foster technological innovation and also the trade, economic development, and environmental dimensions of new technologies such as biofuels.