From its inception in 1977, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has been responsible for maintaining the nation's nuclear stockpile, leading the country in terms of basic research, setting national energy goals, and managing thousands of individual programs. Despite these gains, however, the DOE...

Energy security has in recent years grown as a salient policy and political issue. To better understand energy security and sustainability concerns, this study's main objective is to present an energy security index which measures national performance on energy security over time. Based on three...

A combination of technical complexity, tight coupling, speed, and human fallibility contribute to the unexpected failure of large-scale energy technologies. This study offers a preliminary assessment of the social and economic costs of major energy accidents from 1907 to 2007. It documents 279...

To avoid promoting technologies that merely produce incremental change, the US Department of Energy needs to establish a new organization designed to focus on transformational R&D projects. From its inception in 1977, the US Department of Energy (DOE) has been responsible for maintaining the...

This paper explores both the promise and the possible pitfalls of the plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) concept, focusing first on its definition and then on its technical state-of-the-art. More originally, the paper assesses significant, though often overlooked,...

Based on extensive research interviews and supplemented with a review of the academic literature, this article assesses the best way to promote renewable energy and energy efficiency. It begins by briefly laying out why government intervention is needed, and then details the four most favored...

Various metrics exist for energy security assessment along with a diffuse array of different strategies for improving national performance. These independent and interacted metrics overlap, however, and are rarely considered systematically. The objective of this study is to translate often...

To underscore both the diversity and severity of energy security tradeoffs, this study examines five different energy security policy packages—five distinct strategies aimed at reducing oil dependence, enhancing energy affordability, expanding access to modern energy services, responding to...