Seeds

Stakeholder-Based Environmentally-Sustainable and Economically Doable Scenarios for the Energy Transition

Urgent efforts to cut energy-related greenhouse gas emissions in the EU are hindered by the limitations of the methods used to inform the design of national energy transition pathways. The techno-economic worldview of cost minimization embedded in these methods means that the resulting scenarios remain disconnected from the many challenges to their implementation and concerns of real stakeholders — both citizens and policymakers.

Such concerns are often environmental (e.g. land and resource use) or social (e.g. acceptance of infrastructure for local residents). So far, no solutions exist to integrate these into the techno-economic energy system modelling methods used to design future energy scenarios. We address this issue by developing and testing a novel computational workflow to actively engage humans in scenario design while accurately modelling the relevant technical, economic, and environmental constraints.