ASU School of Sustainability's new sustainable energy PhD program will kick off in August 2017, focusing on overcoming obstacles to implementing national renewable energy systems.

Christine Sturm, a PhD candidate in the school, looks to Germany's renewable energy transition to learn from the substantial challenges it has faced.

She explains, "Energy systems are complex amalgams of technologies, institutions, markets, regulations and social arrangements. Nations have little experience intervening in such socio-technical systems.”

According to Professor and Senior Sustainability Scientist Martin Pasqualetti, these are precisely the challenges students in the revolutionary new program will address.

“We’re going to be a leading educational institution on this,” he says.