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The transition to clean, modern energy systems requires more than technological innovation. Over the past two centuries, society has built infrastructure, institutions, markets, regulations, business models, and daily practices around fossil fuel energy systems. Successfully deploying new energy technologies, even when they're technically superior and economically competitive, requires understanding and addressing the social, institutional, and behavioral factors that shape how technologies are adopted, how markets function, and how transitions unfold.

A solar panel that's 30% efficient but never gets installed produces no energy. An electric vehicle that saves money over its lifetime but sits unsold in a dealership reduces no emissions. A building efficiency technology that's cost-effective but faces regulatory barriers or financing challenges achieves no savings. RASEI's social, institutional, and behavioral research examines why promising technologies sometimes fail to achieve widespread adoption despite compelling technical and economic advantages and develops strategies to overcome these barriers.

This work complements and informs RASEI's technical research across all areas. Understanding adoption barriers helps researchers design technologies that fit real-world constraints. Analyzing business models and market structures reveals where cost reductions matter most. Examining institutional barriers identifies which policy changes would have the greatest impact. By integrating social science with engineering and physical science, RASEI develops not just better technologies, but pathways for those technologies to achieve real-world impact.

This research leads to multiple types of actionable insights: technology design changes that address adoption barriers, policy recommendations based on evidence about what works, business model innovations that make clean energy profitable, communication strategies that effectively convey technology benefits, and institutional reforms that enable rather than hinder deployment.

The energy transition involves technical challenges, but also economic, institutional, social, and behavioral dimensions. By analyzing these human and institutional factors with the same rigor applied to technical questions, RASEI's social science research helps ensure that technological advances translate into real-world impact, helping to deploy systems that reduce energy consumption, lower costs, and benefit communities broadly.