Jan Rosenow is a British-German academic who is Professor of Energy and Climate Policy at the University of Oxford. He leads the Energy Programme at the Environmental Change Institute and serves as a Jackson Senior Research Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford. He is also a Senior Associate at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership at the University of Cambridge and Affiliate Faculty at the University of Sussex. Rosenow's research spans energy demand, energy efficiency, electrification and climate policy. He has published over 150 peer-reviewed articles and appears in Stanford University's database of the top 2% most cited scientists worldwide. He has advised organisations including the World Bank, the World Economic Forum and the International Energy Agency, and has provided expert testimony to both the UK Parliament and the European Parliament. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Economist and The Guardian.
Early life and education Rosenow was born in 1979, he grew up in Lemgo, Germany where he founded a local environmental group at the age of eight. He went on to study Geosciences at the University of Münster, graduating with a Diplom. He then completed an MSc in Environmental Policy at the London School of Economics. In 2009, Rosenow began a doctorate in energy policy at the University of Oxford's School of Geography and the Environment, where he was a member of St Hilda's College. His thesis, Politics of Change: Energy Efficiency Policy in Britain and Germany, supervised by Nick Eyre and Miranda Schreurs, was submitted in 2013. He completed executive training at the University of Cambridge and the Florence School of Regulation.
Career In June 2015, Rosenow joined the Centre on Innovation and Energy Demand and SPRU (Science and Technology Policy Research Unit) at the University of Sussex as a Senior Fellow, while also holding Honorary Research Associate positions at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford and at the Freie Universität Berlin's Environmental Policy Research Centre. Rosenow also conducted research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the summer of 2012, the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy and the Öko-Institut. He taught in nature, society and environmental policy at the School of Geography and the Environment and in economics and policy of energy and the environment at University College London's Energy Institute. His research focuses on energy demand, energy efficiency, electrification, renewable energy, and energy and climate policy. Rosenow served as vice president and European Programme Director at the Regulatory Assistance Project (RAP), a global non-profit organisation working on energy and climate policy, later continuing as a Senior Advisor to RAP through a collaboration with the Environmental Change Institute (ECI). In March 2025, Rosenow was appointed Energy Programme Lead at the ECI and Jackson Senior Research Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford, returning to the department where he completed his doctorate. The position is supported by the Frank Jackson Foundation, a grant-giving trust funding research on energy systems, conservation and the environment. He is also a Visitor at the ZERO Institute (Zero-carbon Energy Research Oxford) at the University of Oxford. After only 3 months in post, on 18 July 2025, he was conferred the title of Professor of Energy and Climate Policy by Oxford's Vice-chancellor, Irene Tracey.
Research Rosenow's research focuses on energy demand, energy efficiency and the decarbonisation of heating systems, spanning energy efficiency policy, heat pump deployment and the role of hydrogen in building decarbonisation.
Energy efficiency policy Rosenow has examined energy efficiency obligations, schemes that require energy suppliers to deliver energy savings at the customer end. In an early study he traced the evolution of the United Kingdom's supplier obligations from their introduction in 1994 through the Energy Efficiency Commitment and the Carbon Emissions Reduction Target, examining how the instrument changed over time and what drove those changes. With Nick Eyre he assessed the transition from these schemes to the Green Deal and the Energy Company Obligation, analysing the institutional changes involved and the implications of introducing a private-finance mechanism for household energy efficiency. With Edith Bayer he carried out a comparative review of the costs, cost-effectiveness and wider benefits of energy efficiency obligations across several European countries, and led the first systematic evaluation of Poland's white-certificate scheme, drawing on a database of more than 4,000 delivered projects. In 2017 he was the lead author of a report for the International Energy Agency, commissioned by the G7 energy ministers, which the IEA described as the first global overview of market-based instruments for energy efficiency, including energy efficiency obligations, auctions and white-certificate programmes. A peer-reviewed companion study found that the number of such instruments had roughly quadrupled over the preceding decade, to around 50 obligation and auction schemes worldwide, with the investment they mobilised reaching some US$26 billion in 2015. In work with Florian Kern and Karoline Rogge, he argued that stimulating energy transitions requires policy instrument mixes that are both comprehensive and well-targeted, supporting simple, cost-effective efficiency measures alongside more complex and costly technologies.
Electrification Rosenow uses the term "electrofficiency" to describe the inherent efficiency gains of electric technologies over the fossil-fuelled equipment they replace. He has estimated that a global switch to electrification would roughly halve global energy demand. In 2022, Rosenow co-authored Heating up the global heat pump market in Nature Energy with Duncan Gibb, Thomas Nowak and Richard Lowes, arguing that heat pumps would play a central role in decarbonising buildings worldwide and that stronger policy support would be needed to accelerate deployment at the scale required to meet climate targets. He has examined how taxes and levies on electricity and fossil fuels influence technology adoption and affect the competitiveness of electric heating technologies. He has also examined the role of industrial electrification in reducing dependence on imported fossil fuels while supporting climate objectives.
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