Dr. Kirsten Westphal
Kirsten Westphal is a member of the Executive Board of the German Association of Energy and Water Industries (BDEW). Previously, she was a board member of the H2Global Foundation, where she was responsible for independent analysis and research.
At the BDEW, she is responsible for the department of "Security of Supply, Energy Efficiency, Markets, Mobility, Trading, and Gas-Specific Issues." Between 2008 and 2021, she worked at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP). There, she led, among other projects, the "Geopolitics of Energy Transformation – Hydrogen" project, funded by the German Federal Foreign Office, for which she now serves as an external consultant. She was a member of the expert panel of the Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation from 2018 to 2019. The political scientist, who holds a doctorate, was a research assistant at Justus Liebig University Giessen and at the Instituto de Relaciones Europeo-Latinoamericanas (IRELA) in Madrid. Before that, she was an employee of PreussenElektra AG.
She has published extensively on international energy relations and the energy foreign relations of Germany and the EU. Her books include Global Energy Governance in a Multipolar World (Aldershot/Burlington Ashgate, 2010) and The Political and Economic Challenges of Energy in the Middle East and North Africa (Routledge, 2018). Her recent publications on the geopolitical implications of the energy transition and energy security in the era of decarbonization have appeared in Nature, Global Policy, Energy Policy, Energy Strategy Review, European Energy & Climate Journal, Energy Research and Social Sciences, and at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP). Her opinion pieces and commentaries have been published in, among others, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Handelsblatt, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, The Wall Street Journal, and Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
