Shimon Awerbuch was a distinguished financial and energy economist. He had worked for the past four years at the University of Sussex, latterly as a senior Fellow in the Sussex Energy Group (part of the Science and Technology Policy Research Unit).

Awerbuch was born in Tel Aviv in 1946, but his family soon moved to the US, where he spent most of his life. After early work in architecture and planning, he specialised in financial economics and the often troubled relationship between the professions of economics and accountancy. Throughout his very full career he successfully spanned the worlds of academia, consultan-cy and engagement with public policy and regulation.

He ran an independent financial economic practice specialising in energy and utility regulation, as well as the economics of innovation. At the same time he published widely, for example in the American Economic Review. He worked, at different times, for both Ernst & Young and the New York State Executive Department, where he developed a great deal of expert testimony for regulatory proceedings.

In the 1990s he moved to Paris as a senior advisor to the International Energy Agency, and he joined SPRU in 2003.

He was renowned for his advanced work in the later 1990s on radical changes he foresaw as vital to the operation of electricity systems and on the idea of the “virtual utility” — ideas that have only recently entered more mainstream debate in Europe. He was co-author of an influential book on the apparently dry — but in policy terms critical — area of electricity transmission, a subject that required the ability to understand both complex technology and economics.

His recent work was particularly creative, translating tools developed in financial economics to the analysis of energy systems, especially contemporary energy policy issues of supply security and climate change.

His work on diversity, security and portfolios, with especially striking results for the value that should be placed on renewable energy generation, was of the highest quality and originality. He recently presented some of this work to a prestigious annual meeting of the European Investment Bank, a sign that, again, his pioneering work was beginning to find favour with mainstream thinking in energy finance and policy.

His intellectual contribution was marked by persistent curiosity and an optimistic, yet practical, desire to find new ways forward, with a particular passion for finding solutions to policy and business problems that were decentralised and empowering.

A warm and tolerant personality, Awerbuch was unfailingly generous and enthusiastic about his colleagues’ work. He enjoyed living in Europe and was an enthusiastic and skilled pilot.

He, his partner, Maria Ribei-ro, and his son died when the light aircraft he was piloting crashed in bad weather in southern France.

Awerbuch is survived by his son from an earlier marriage.

Shimon Awerbuch, financial and energy economist, was born on May 19, 1946. He died on February 10, 2007, aged 60