Efforts to address the contemporary climate and energy-related challenges towards a green, inclusive, and fair transition by 2050, require the empowerment and engagement of citizens and other societal actors, as has been duly acknowledged within the recent European Union’s strategic and legislative frameworks.
Citizens are anticipated to expand their role as self-consumers and contributors within energy communities, actively shaping alterations in the energy landscape, impacting both demand and supply.
Building on the work done previously, our new deliverable produced within the Horizon 2020 ENCLUDE project entitled “Decarbonisation impact of energy citizenship at the local level” aims to expand and employ different modelling frameworks of the ENCLUDE modelling ensemble as well as to extract insights regarding the decarbonisation potential of energy citizenship at the local level.
Set to explore the decarbonisation potential of different energy citizenship expressions mainly manifested at the local level, in this deliverable, we focus on three (3) of the four (4) ENCLUDE “people-centered” storylines, namely the “Power to the People” storyline, the “Band Together” storyline, and the “Habitual Creatures” storyline.
Combined with the ENCLUDE “future-world” narratives, a scenario space to study case-specific decarbonisation pathways, acknowledging the depth of complexity and diversity of the European landscape was created.
In this endeavor, we harnessed the power of existing models comprising the ENCLUDE modelling ensemble, as well as expanded it by developing a new modelling framework (i.e., ANIMO) to study the diffusion of social and grassroot innovations related to energy citizenship, like Collective Energy Initiatives (CEIs).
Overall, we provide modelling results for the following three (3) cases:
“Power to the People” through empowering prosumerism and citizen investments in small-scale photovoltaic and residential battery energy storage systems.
“Band Together” and further diffusion and growth of Collective Energy Initiatives (CEIs), like energy community and ecovillage structures.
“Power to the People” and “Habitual Creatures” storylines in Carbon and Coal Intensive Regions: Citizen-led pathways based on energy efficiency investments and lifestyle and behavioral changes towards just and inclusive transitions.
You can read and download the full report here.
For more information about ENCLUDE visit the project’s website.