Project description
Clean energy transition through citizen and community engagement
Energy citizenship involves the active involvement and empowerment of the people in the energy sector and is crucial to the EU's drive for clean-energy transition. Energy communities, non-commercial market actors in the energy sector, can also help to achieve this goal. The EU-funded EC2 project will develop a psychological conceptualisation to understand what it takes to become an energy citizen, and identify legal and socio-economic market factors that can hinder or promote the emergence of and engagement of citizens in energy communities. They will test these factors, their psychological underpinnings, and for the conduciveness of energy citizenship for broader sustainable policy goals to create digital tools with stakeholders to overcome these barriers.
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.
Fields of science
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
1150 Wien
Austria