Sovacool has a bachelor's degree in Philosophy and Communication Studies (2001) from John Carroll University, master's degrees in Rhetoric (2003) from Wayne State University and in Science Policy (2005) Virginia Tech, and a PhD (2006) in Science and Technology Studies from Virginia Tech.

[6] In 2013, Sovacool was Director of the Center for Energy Technology and professor of business and social sciences at Aarhus University in Denmark.

[10][11] Sovacool has authored numerous academic articles and book chapters and has written opinion editorials for The Wall Street Journal and the San Francisco Chronicle.

[13][14] In 2008, he wrote The Dirty Energy Dilemma: What’s Blocking Clean Power in the United States which was published by Praeger and won a 2009 Nautilus Book Award.

Harrison Fell et al. analyzed the same data as Sovacool did, finding that "nuclear power and renewable energy are both associated with lower per capita CO2 emissions with effects of similar magnitude", and pointing out bias and basic statistical fallacies in the Sovacool publication - for example, arbitrarily choosing 1990-2004 and 2000-2014 periods for their analysis, incorrectly accepting their null hypothesis when their analysis did not achieve statistical significance and other such issues.

[26] Sovacool and colleagues have challenged such publications, with a rebuttal in Nature Energy noting that "rather than finding any critical flaws in our analysis," such studies instead "have only effectively confirmed our own basis for raising critical questions about the assumptions of parity in the carbon reducing effects of nuclear and renewable strategies.