In the first stages of GRETA, much of the work has focused around understanding energy citizenship and what it means, especially in the context of 6 case studies. The initial research has been based on reading and understanding the research literature and using this to create frameworks and models that will support interpretation of data collected through other research activities in the project. There has been direct communication with people involved in the case studies, through interviews and workshops. One set of workshops has focused on working with the communities to co-design community-level indicators (CLIs), which are measurements that can help planners, policy makers and communities to measure progress towards the case study goals. At the same time, these communities have been trying to define what actions they would like to take in order to achieve their goals. These are represented as Community Transition Pathways (CTPs). Energy-related data has also been collected from and about the case studies. At the same time, GRETA has drawn on all the different types of knowledge gained through its research activities and used this in the design of a Europe wide survey, aimed at gaining new knowledge about energy citizens, from the perspective of residents, companies and policy makers. This has yielded around 10,500 responses from across 16 European countries.
In the second stage of the project, GRETA has continued working with case study communities to finalise the Community Transition Pathways (CTPs) and to formalise these for three case studies into Energy Citizenship Contracts (ECCs) that define roles and responsibilities to achieve actions laid out in the CTPs. This stage has also focused on modelling the multinational survey data in various ways to understand the perspectives of energy citizenship across Europe. This modelling has revealed interesting insights. For example, it shows differences between countries in how energy citizenship manifests as well as differing drivers and priorities between civil society, companies and decision-makers. In addition, clustering of the data from the general public has yielded 8 distinct personas each of which reflects differences in how people may enact energy citizenship actions, based on their attitudes and knowledge but importantly, also according to their individual and local circumstances.
In order to disseminate and further exploit key project results, much of the GRETA findings have been embedded into a GRETA analytics tool through which it is possible to explore the emergence of different types of energy citizenship across different geographical scales, as well as explore many of the project outcomes including the multinational survey data. All key project findings have also been included into 6 policy briefs that have been disseminated to policy makers. A social media campaign has been produced and disseminated, promoting energy citizenship through energy communities.
