Dr. Almut Kirchner

Chapter 5

Dr. Almut Kirchner, physicist, is a director at Prognos AG in Basel, Switzerland, where she leads the “Energy and Climate Policy” department and the “Models” competence center. She joined Prognos AG in 2002 as a senior project manager. Prior to that, she gained four years of administrative experience as a specialist for the promotion of energy efficiency and renewable energies in a federal state environmental ministry, and she also has five years of experience as a managing director of a federal state energy agency.
Her main areas of work are model-based long-term forecasts and scenarios of overall energy systems. Specifically, she examines questions regarding the ecological and economic impacts of energy generation and consumption, system and infrastructure issues, energy policy, supply security and vulnerability, as well as the effects of energy and climate policy instruments.
She possesses specific methodological competence in modeling and simulating feedback and nonlinear dynamic systems. She primarily leads strategic studies for overall energy systems and technology studies. For example, she has been leading the scientific work of scenario studies for the Swiss Energy Perspectives (Federal Office of Energy, Bern) for decades, in addition to providing energy forecasts and scenarios for various German federal and state ministries, environmental associations (e. g., WWF “Model Germany: Thinking Climate Protection from the Goal”), industry associations (e. g., BDI/BCG “Climate Paths for Germany”), and technology studies for different associations and clients.