This paper explores the implications of the energy transformation debate for energy-based social science research. Energy is of profound importance as a lens through which to view social processes. Given the increasingly urgent need to transition to a sustainable energy system, it is vital that we understand as much as possible about the multifaceted, complex network of dynamics and interests shaping, and shaped-by, competing visions of what such a transition entails, and how it is best achieved. This paper, published in the Energy Research and Social Science journal, explores the key implications involved in this momentous debate for the social sciences, addressing the dynamics involved through consideration of three contending approaches: renewable energy, nuclear power, and climate geoengineering. Several challenges are identified for social science, applying especially where there are aims to help enable more democratic exercise of social agency. The paper concludes that if social science is to support the transformation to a sustainable global energy infrastructure, then the following principles may prove important: Social science research doesn’t simply tackle complexity for the sake of scientific or engineering goals; it also assists in forming and evolving those goals, and of society more widely. Aspirations or claims to a singular prescriptive conclusion are as misleading in the social science of energy as in other social science disciplines, conferring a responsibility to deconstruct such claims. Instead, social science should present to policy-makers an explicit plurality of social interpretations of energy alternatives under different reasonable perspectives, carefully explicating each with its associated constituting conditions. Social science should also examine its own contexts, and the practices of justification therein. This includes how specific reduced understandings of ‘sustainability, ‘transitions’, and ‘planetary governance’ favour and suppress different political interests and implications. This entails that social science in the service of democratic energy politics should be open and reflexive, and self-critical about its own subjectivities. It is a matter of rigour as much as democracy that social science should resist the shaping of knowledge by incumbent interests by ensuring that marginal interests are promoted, privilege is redistributed, and choices benefiting the less powerful are enabled.