While at Virginia Tech, Sovacool worked as a graduate student on a grant from the National Science Foundation's Electric Power Networks Efficiency and Security Program analyzing the barriers to small-scale renewable electricity sources and distributed generation in the United States.[4] He worked in research and advisory capacities for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, Semiconductor Materials and Equipment International, the Global Environment Facility, the World Bank Group, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.[4]
From 2007 until 2011 Sovacool was at the National University of Singapore, where he led research projects supported by the MacArthur Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation investigating how to improve energy security for impoverished rural communities throughout Asia.[5]
In 2013, Sovacool was Director of the Center for Energy Technology and professor of business and social sciences at Aarhus University in Denmark.[7][8] He is also Professor of Energy Policy at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom.[9] Sovacool lectures on energy security, alternative and renewable energy, environmental economics, and energy policy.[4]
In Contesting the Future of Nuclear Power (2011) Sovacool says, following a detailed analysis, that there is a "consensus among a broad base of independent, nonpartisan experts that nuclear power plants are a poor choice for producing electricity", and that "energy efficiency programs and renewable power technologies are better than nuclear power plants".[16] In 2016, Sovacool, Andrew Lawrence and Andrew Stirling published an article in Climate Policy claiming that pro-nuclear energy countries had acted more slowly to address climate change.[17][18] Critics pointed out errors in the data the article was based on,[19][20] and the authors retracted it, as the two errors "had the combined effect of invalidating key findings of this paper".[21]
In October 2020, Sovacool and Stirling published another article in Nature Energy[22] analysing data from 123 countries over 25 years that again argues that pro-nuclear countries do not show significantly lower carbon emissions, and that in poorer countries nuclear programmes are associated with relatively higher carbon emissions.[23][24] The results have been disputed in two publications. Harrison Fell et al. analyzed the same data as Sovacool did, finding that "nuclear power and renewable energy are both associated with lower per capita CO2 emissions with effects of similar magnitude", and pointing out bias and basic statistical fallacies in the Sovacool publication - for example, arbitrarily choosing 1990-2004 and 2000-2014 periods for their analysis, incorrectly accepting their null hypothesis when their analysis did not achieve statistical significance and other such issues.[25]Friedrich Wagner investigated the CO2 emissions caused by nuclear and renewable power. His "results are in complete contradiction" with the Sovacool study.[26] Sovacool and colleagues have challenged such publications, with a rebuttal in Nature Energy noting that "rather than finding any critical flaws in our analysis," such studies instead "have only effectively confirmed our own basis for raising critical questions about the assumptions of parity in the carbon reducing effects of nuclear and renewable strategies."[27]
Sovacool, BK and SV Valentine. The National Politics of Nuclear Power: Economics, Security, and Governance (London: Routledge, 2012)
Sovacool, BK and IM Drupady. Energy Access, Poverty, and Development: The Governance of Small-Scale Renewable Energy in Developing Asia (New York: Ashgate, 2012)
Sovacool, BK and CJ Cooper. The Governance of Energy Megaprojects: Politics, Hubris, and Energy Security (London: Edward Elgar, 2013)
Sovacool, BK. Energy & Ethics: Justice and the Global Energy Challenge (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013)
Sovacool, BK, R Sidortsov, and B Jones. Energy Security, Equality and Justice (London: Routledge, 2013)
Halff, Antoine, J Rozhon and BK Sovacool (Eds.). Energy Poverty: Global Challenges and Local Solutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)
Sovacool, BK and MH Dworkin. Global Energy Justice: Principles, Problems, and Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)
Sovacool, BK (Ed.). Energy Security (London: Sage, Six Volumes, 2014)
Sovacool, BK (Ed.). Energy, Poverty, and Development (London: Routledge Critical Concepts in Development Studies Series, Four Volumes, 2014)
Sovacool, BK and BO Linnér. The Political Economy of Climate Change Adaptation (Basingstoke UK/New York United States: Palgrave Macmillan and the Nature Publishing Group, 2015)
Sovacool, BK, MA Brown, and SV Valentine. Fact and Fiction in Global Energy Policy: Fifteen Contentious Questions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016)
Van de Graaf, T, BK Sovacool, F Kern, A Ghosh, and MT Klare (Eds.). The Palgrave Handbook of the International Political Economy of Energy (Basingstoke UK/New York United States: Palgrave Macmillan Handbooks in International Political Economy Series, 2016)
Valentine, SV, MA Brown, and BK Sovacool. Empowering the Great Energy Transition: Policy for a Low-Carbon Future (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019)
Sovacool, BK. Visions of Energy Futures: Imagining and Innovating Low-Carbon Transitions (New York and London: Routledge, 2019).
Noel, L, J Kester, G Zarazua de Rubens, and BK Sovacool. Vehicle-to-Grid: A Sociotechnical Transition Beyond Electric Mobility (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2019).
Van de Graaf, T and BK Sovacool. Global Energy Politics (Oxford: Polity Press, 2020).
^Sioshansi, Fereidoon P. (December 2007). "Energy and American Society—Thirteen Myths, B. Sovacool, M. Brown (Eds.). Springer, Berlin (2007, ISBN: 978-1-4020-5563-8, 371pp., $79.95". Energy Policy. 35 (12): 6554–6555. doi:10.1016/j.enpol.2007.08.008.
^Sovacool, Benjamin K.; Schmid, Patrick; Stirling, Andy; Walter, Goetz; MacKerron, Gordon (January 2022). "Reply to: Nuclear power and renewable energy are both associated with national decarbonization". Nature Energy. 7 (1): 30–31. Bibcode:2022NatEn...7...30S. doi:10.1038/s41560-021-00965-9. S2CID246363862.