Energy Citizenship and Energy Communities for a Clean Energy Transition
Project dates: 01. May 2021 - 30. Apr 2024
Objective
Energy citizenship – the active involvement and empowerment of the people in the energy sector – is a cornerstone to achieve a clean-energy transition and to build a low carbon and resilient future in the European Union within the next decades. Energy communities – non-commercial market actors in the energy sector – can help to achieve this goal once their potential is known and acknowledge by the citizens of the EU. Hence, the overarching objective of this proposed research is to scale-up both energy citizenship and energy communities to achieve greater social acceptability and more durable governance arrangements via actionable policy recommendations for policy makers. To this end, we employ a transdisciplinary team of experts to (i) develop a psychological conceptualization to understand what it takes to become an energy citizen, (ii) identify legal and socio-economic market factors that can hinder or promote an emergence of and engagement of citizens in energy communities, (iii) experimentally test and gather quantitative-empirical evidence for these factors, psychological underpinnings, and for the conduciveness of energy citizenship for broader sustainable policy goals, (iv) use insights from the empirical work to foster the co-creation of digital tools with stakeholders to overcome barriers, (v) distill and disseminate the gained knowledge in Energy Citizenship Dialogues and an Academy, in a series of community Open-Days across five countries, in scientific articles, at conferences, in online repositories for durable access, and in briefings to policy makers on local, national and EU-level. In line with the EU's thrust to empower the people in the energy sector, this innovative research will provide valuable and evidence-based understanding. It will illuminate the socio-economic, psychological and related factors and their interrelations with legal, regulatory and policy aspects to inform practical applications for fostering energy citizenship.
