Bouncing Forward Sustainably: Pathways to a post-COVID world. Sustainable Energy

The global lockdown due to COVID-19 has reduced industrial activities, construction, tourism, material demand, and mobility. This has impacted many sectors of the global economy including the energy sector which has witnessed movements both towards and away from sustainability. Key trends observed include a reduced demand for both energy and energy services, zero to negative oil prices, disruptions in the supply chain of energy technologies and materials – specially for renewable energy, and a decline in investments. This has led to welcome reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution, revealed opportunities for new and digitalized business models and responsible lifestyle choices, but all these will be short lived if we go back to business as usual. Such behavioral and societal changes have revealed the potential for structural change and transitions in demand for energy services towards sustainability. An interesting revelation is that the positive fallouts for sustainable development are all related to what are commonly perceived to be difficult-to-overcome barriers such as lifestyle choices, behavior, and business models. Whereas the negative fallouts for sustainable development are the relatively easier to address issues of reinstating supply chains and kick-starting/accelerating investments in sustainable energy. As the world looks to recover from the economic and jobs related consequences of the pandemic, all stakeholders have a responsibility to ensure that we create a system of incentives to reward sustainable behavior while penalizing those actions that would take us back to the path of unsustainability. For the energy sector, this would translate not only to the choices that influence the supply of energy, including evaluating the balance of centralized and decentralized energy options, but also the choices that would impact the demand for energy itself! Re-examining these business models from the point of view of contributions to economic gro