Harry Saunders
Visiting Investigator, Conceptual Investigations Unit
Harry Saunders is a Visiting Investigator at the Conceptual Investigations Unit.
Background
Harry Saunders is a Visiting Investigator at the Conceptual Investigations Unit and Managing Director (retired) of Decision Processes Incorporated, where he advised corporations on strategic decision-making under uncertainty. An economist of energy and energy efficiency, he is widely regarded as a founding figure in the study of the energy-efficiency rebound effect — he coined the term "Khazzoom–Brookes Postulate," the idea that gains in energy efficiency can lead, paradoxically, to greater overall energy use. His earlier career included serving as Manager of Strategy at the Tosco Corporation and work with the U.S. Department of Commerce and the International Energy Agency. Beyond energy, his interests range across evolutionary biology and the theory of evidence in law.
Harry has a B.Sc. in Honors Physics from the University of Alberta, an M.Sc. in Resources and the Environment from the University of Calgary, and a Ph.D. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University. He has over 40 articles in peer-reviewed journals.
Selected scientific contributions
Energy efficiency and the rebound effect
- Evidence that policy-induced energy-saving efficiency improvements can amplify, rather than undermine, the effectiveness of climate-change mitigation (Wang et al., 2019).
- Empirical evidence that rebound effects are large enough to materially change the conclusions of climate-change models (Saunders, 2015).
- A documentation of energy-efficiency rebound across thirty U.S. economic sectors, with a toolkit for other rebound analysts (Saunders, 2013).
- A production-function framework clarifying when efficiency improvements conserve energy and when they increase its use (Saunders, 2008).
- A macroeconomic account of rebound, backfire, and the Khazzoom–Brookes postulate (Saunders, 2000), together with an analysis of how rebound estimates depend on distinguishing energy from the services it provides (Saunders, 2000).
- The paper that named the Khazzoom–Brookes postulate and set it within neoclassical growth theory (Saunders, 1992).
Energy efficiency, policy, and security
- A multi-author review assessing what four decades of energy-efficiency research has delivered (Saunders et al., 2021).
- An exergy-based, national-level method finding rebound large enough to threaten low-carbon goals (Brockway et al., 2017).
- An examination of how bundled policies interact in the pursuit of energy security (Sovacool and Saunders, 2014).
- An energy-economics assessment of whether solid-state (LED) lighting will reduce or expand overall energy use (Tsao et al., 2010).