Daniel M Kammen is an American scientist, renewable energy expert, and former government figure. He is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Energy and Climate Justice, Department of Civil and Systems Engineering (CASE) & School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS); Director of Renewable Energy and Equity Worldwide (RENEW) Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University; and a Member of the United States National Academy of Science and American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Kammen served as lead author for a Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. He is speaking at the upcoming Australian Energy Week.
My career in energy research, outreach and public engagement has been one of exciting and constant discovery, re-discovery, re-training, as both the ability to reach farther and faster toward a zero-carbon emission system has expanded, and the ability to work meaningfully on the social and environmental justice aspects of the issue have expanded.
With the past decade of innovation in clean energy systems, where solar and wind prices have dropped by 90%, and wind costs have declined by 60%, it is now possible to not only imagine and to model, but to practically implement climate- and humanity- and ecosystem-smart choices that many skeptics did not see as possible. In each of 2024 and 2025 renewable energy made up more than 90% of new generation capacity, and that clean energy came in at or under budget, and created more jobs than equivalent fossil-based energy systems.
There no longer is a comparison or a debate, except for the troubling macro-fact that worldwide, incentives are massively out of balance. Global investment in clean energy reached $2.2 trillion in 2025, but fossil fuel subsidies remain high, with explicit subsidies totaling $725 billion in 2024 and implicit subsidies (including environmental costs) reaching $6.7 trillion, heavily favoring incumbent fuels. Quite simply we are subsidizing the petro-state and impeding the electrostate at virtually every opportunity.
In my own work, a two-pronged battle has been needed. First, I have worked with amazing students and colleagues to build and share open-source and open-access modeling tools for the grid (so called ‘capacity expansion’) models where we can look clearly at the costs (to companies and the state, but also to people and the environment) of building new clean or dirty energy projects, to transmission upgrades, and to the costs and benefits of different energy, water, and climate policies. In Australia, already a global leader in distributed rooftop solar, the opportunity for even more rapid decarbonisation, job-creation, and both social and environmental justice is clear: larger efforts to deploy coupled clean energy and energy storage systems, with even greater advances of only electric vehicle use, but also dynamic ‘vehicle-to-grid’ technologies and markets are low-hanging fruit opportunities. Finding creative financing schemes to de-risk energy storage should be a technology-to-policy game that everyone is creating and playing non-stop. The more experiments, the more victories we find, so exploring ‘feebates’, ‘decoupling of electricity sales and profits’, and social and environmental cost accounting are all areas where Australian policy makers have opportunity after opportunity.
Drawing on your work in regions such as East Africa and the Western USA, how are different grid models — from large-scale systems to mini- and micro-grids — shaping the way countries expand and modernise their energy systems?
Our model, SWITCH, has been used to assess and to ultimately help governments turn away from fossil energy in the USA, in Kenya, in Malaysia, in Nicaragua, and in Bangladesh.
We work on energy access via mini-, micro- and metro-grids (different scales and terms for smart energy systems based on clean energy and energy storage) that can be used to power health clinics, communities, businesses, and increasingly heavy industry. New innovations are of course needed for longer-duration storage, and for smarter energy monitoring, market rules, and for efforts to spread the rewards of clean energy to those historically denied access and services.
The other dimension of my work is on energy and climate justice, or ‘inclusive growth’ to adopt the other term often used for this work. In the USA, for example, my team found that installations of rooftop solar were dramatically skewed away from people and communities of color over more an order of magnitude of income (from under the US poverty line of USD$25,500/year to over USD$250,000/year). This is simply racism and discrimination by another name.
It keeps us busy, that is for sure, but the work has never been more exciting or in demand.