Despite failing his 11-plus, Professor Dennis Anderson became a key scientist in the field of energy and the environment, most recently contributing to the Stern review on the economics of climate change. He was a highly creative applied economist who drew on his engineering background to give his life’s work on energy a unique quality and authority.

The youngest son of a Sheffield coalman and charabanc owner, at 15 he was apprenticed to the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), studying at Rotherham Technical College for his higher national diploma.

There a perceptive lecturer recognised his remarkable mathematical ability after observing him on a tram reading algebra for pleasure. Equally unusual was the reason why he had failed his 11-plus — he saw too many answers to put pen to paper, an early sign of his ability to think outside established lines, and later to cross boundaries in a career that took him from the energy industry to international development and environment organisations, universities, and energy and climate policy bodies.

Once launched, he progressed quickly, becoming Institute of Electrical Engineering prizewinner on graduation from Rotherham in 1959. He gained the diploma of Imperial College and its Hinton Prize in Nuclear Engineering in 1960. In 1962 he became a nuclear reactor physicist and then a senior power system engineer with the CEGB, while also taking an MSc in engineering at Manchester.

At the CEGB he developed multi-equation models to solve reactor kinetics and heat transfer equations, and was elected to the Institute of Physics. He designed electricity distribution and transmission systems, wrote programs to optimise investments, and took a year out to study at the LSE for an MSc in econometrics.

In 1967 he became an economic adviser at the Ministry of Technology, where his work included appraisal methods for nuclear power projects. In 1969 he moved to the World Bank in Washington as a senior economist. Over the next two decades he went on more than 80 missions to 30 developing countries.

His four-year research partnership with his mentor, Ralph Turvey, produced Electricity Economics, an influential volume on electricity pricing and investment.

In 1989 Royal Dutch Shell invited him to be its chief economist, a two-year post. His brief included analysis for the famous long-term Shell Scenarios of alternative energy futures. He wrote increasingly about economic growth and the environment.

He also became a visiting professor at University College London, helping the late Professor David Pearce, then Britain’s leading environmental economist, to develop research and postgraduate teaching in environmental economics and policy.

In 1991 he returned to the World Bank as senior adviser on energy and industry. He played a major role in the Bank’s 1992 World Development Report, Development and the Environment. This acknowledged that the Bank had underestimated the importance of the environment, said that “accelerated economic and human development is sustainable and can be consistent with improving environmental conditions”, and accepted that this would “require major policy, programme, and institutional shifts”.

On retiring from the Bank in 1996, he threw himself into the work of Imperial College’s interdisciplinary Centre for Environmental Technology and set up Imperial’s Centre for Energy Policy and Technology (ICEPT). His knowledge of technology, economics and policy equipped him with a special understanding of how to tackle climate change. He became a leading expert on renewable energy, always realistic, but enthusiastic about its potential.

In his last decade, helped by his ICEPT team, he made key policy contributions: providing analysis for energy reviews and White Papers; briefing the Prime Minister and his advisers on low-carbon technologies; and providing specialist advice to parliamentary select committees, the UK Energy Research Centre and the Carbon Trust. As executive adviser to the Stern review he provided technical advice and papers, and inputs to the final report. He also contributed to the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Global Environment Facility’s Science and Technology Advisory Panel.

He was notable for his unstuffy manner and gentle humour, and his students and colleagues saw him as a model of decency, commitment and humility. He insisted that a brighter future for humankind was within reach.

Anderson is survived by his wife, Marsaleete, and their two daughters.

Professor Dennis Anderson, environmental economist, was born on July 12, 1937. He died of cancer on April 20, 2008, aged 70