Profile
Helen Anais Fischer is a research associate and doctoral researcher at the Energy Economics Group (EEG) at TU Wien, which she joined in November 2023, and an Honorary Research Associate in the Environmental Change Institute (ECI) at the University of Oxford. She is a member of the From Minerals to Megawatts (ES3M) research team.
She is completing a PhD in energy economics at TU Wien with a dissertation entitled "Energy Security in a Decarbonised European Energy System". She holds an M.Sc. in Decentralised Energy Systems and Energy Efficiency, with her master's research carried out at Fraunhofer ISI, and a B.Eng. in Mechanical Engineering.
She is involved in teaching energy economics, energy systems and the geopolitics of the energy transition at TU Wien, and will co-teach a module on optimisation methods for energy systems in the MSc in Sustainability, Enterprise and the Environment (SEE) at the University of Oxford's Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, and supervises bachelor's and master's theses.
Helen's research connects energy system modelling and energy security, with a distinctly European policy perspective. She studies how supply risks evolve across the commodities that underpin a decarbonising energy system, from fossil fuels to the critical raw materials required for clean energy technologies. Currently, she is developing the concept of a supply risk budget for net-zero energy systems, a framework that treats geopolitical supply risk as a constrained resource alongside cost and emissions, and quantifies how much additional system cost Europe would need to accept to reduce its exposure to concentrated supply sources.