Deliverables

There are many existing and emerging modes of participation (including non-participation), which are manifested in multiple expressions of energy citizenship. However, not all views on energy citizenship are equally supported. There is support amongst traditional energy system powerholders for certain expressions of energy citizenship. The more ‘acceptable’ expressions are those that do not threaten the status quo. Other expressions which challenge incumbents or government policy are not so welcomed, and indeed such energy citizens are often marginalized by the incumbent powerholders

This deliverable presents a treatment of existing and emerging ideas of citizenship in the energy system and around energy more generally. An analysis of modes of (citizen) participation and related manifestations of energy citizenship is forwarded. This report – the first of two on characterizing and (re)conceptualizing expressions of energy citizenship – will both contribute to the ongoing discourse on the place of the citizen in the energy domain, and feed into the development of an energy citizenship typology to be presented in the second report from this package of work. Acknowledging that privilege(s) shape the type of relationships particular individuals and groups might have with energy, this report opens a discussion on the type(s) of energy citizenship experienced by those at the margins. In this way, an understanding of multiple (sometime overlapping) expressions of citizenship around energy is forwarded. This report will be of interest to both researchers and practitioners interesting in transforming the currently energy system (and its implications) for the way we live our lives.

This deliverable comprises a typology of citizenship in the energy domain. It presents a scoping literature review on energy citizenship and related ideas. It includes a report on a comprehensive engagement of citizens, practitioners and experts through a mixed methods approach involving surveying, in-depth interviewing and asynchronous email interviews. A typology of energy citizenship is presented comprising four categories of ‘access to energy’, ‘energy consumption’, ‘energy production’, and ‘politics and governance’. Fifteen expressions of energy citizenship were described, three under the first category, and four in each of the others. This report comprising the typology, the appreciation of an inclusive multifaceted energy citizenship that will underpin it, and the understanding of the different manifestations of citizenship around energy described in it will contribute to both understanding and mobilising the decarbonisation potential of the energy citizens. This report along with its companion report (D2.1) also contribute to the ongoing discourse (including with peer projects) on the role of citizenship in the energy transition and the meaning and value of energy citizenship.

This part of the ENCLUDE project focuses on the emergence and consolidation of collective energy initiatives, aiming to understand the factors contributing to energy citizenship from a group-centered sociological perspective. Two frameworks, Energy Cultures and the Socio-Ecological Systems Framework for Integrated Community Energy Systems, are used to identify influential factors within and around communities. The methodology involves a three-stage process: identifying cases, surveying initiative members, and conducting interviews with representatives and experts. The analysis shows a good fit between organizers and participants regarding goals and understanding of initiatives and a relatively low incidence of conflicts, with only 15% of survey respondents indicating any kind of conflicts. Bureaucratic barriers, lack of funding, and lack of support by authorities rank high as barriers and fields for improvement. Regarding social composition, different initiative types attract different but relatively specific citizen groups, emphasizing the need for inclusivity and engaging individuals with various socioeconomic backgrounds. Identifying opportunities to integrate broader and more diverse citizen groups, requires follow-up research to explore push- and pull-factors for different target groups, and additional factors affecting collective energy initiatives and concrete success criteria. Future research may focus on energy poverty, political and economic settings, planned and achieved impact, regulations, funding, community culture, barriers faced by communities, and members' relationship with technologies. The presented findings provide valuable starting points for in-depth work into these factors and may thereby help in shaping collective energy initiatives, emphasizing inclusivity, community culture, and addressing barriers for a just and inclusive energy transition.

This deliverable presents the findings of Work Package 3 (WP3) in the ENCLUDE project, focusing on collective energy initiatives. The report is structured into four tasks, exploring the emergence and consolidation of energy citizenship groups. Methodologically, it employs a multi-stage process, involving case identification, surveys, interviews, and cross-examination.

Key themes include energy poverty, motivations for joining, funding, regulations, community culture, and barriers faced by the community. Discrepancies between representatives and members highlight messaging alignment importance. Funding challenges, bureaucratic barriers, and regulatory concerns are emphasized. Community culture and communication play pivotal roles.

Tailored recommendations are provided for various CEI stages, addressing general CEIs, emerging and consolidated Energy Communities (ECs), and Collective Targeted Actions (CTAs). Specific insights for policymakers offer nuanced understandings of factors shaping CEI emergence and consolidation.

This report captures the results of an extensive literature review of studies that cluster citizens regarding their energy/environmental behaviors. The report maps the factors that might be used in the literature to create clusters for decarbonization under the work of WP4. Outputs of the review are presented at two levels: individual and collective. At an individual level, major variables for clustering energy behaviors were categorized as socio-economic and demographic, psychological, energy consumption/environmental patterns across different areas of life (housing, transport, etc.), and other contextual variables. At a collective level, major variables were categorized as socio-economic and demographic, energy infrastructure variables, energy consumption profiles, environmental performance, and other contextual factors.

In the transition to a state of net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases, citizens are supposed to play a much larger role, including as self-consumers and participants in energy communities. As a result of this increasingly participatory role of citizens in the energy system, the new concept of energy citizenship has emerged in recent years. Around this term, we can also find emerging trends/ patterns that can relate to: (i.) the active participation in the energy market, such as the concept of prosumerism, smart technologies, etc., (ii.) behavioral attributes of citizens, (iii.) individual lifestyle changes, (iv.) collective initiatives and expressions of energy citizenship, and (v.) political activities. This report identifies the following trends/ patterns:

• Prosumerism;
• Formation of energy communities;
• Establishment of eco-villages;
• Lifestyle changes;
• Energy efficiency measures;
• Citizens’ behavior;
• Preferences towards RES;
• Participation in energy transition movements;
• Participation in energy sector planning and decision-making.

The process of decision-making on climate and energy policy is a challenging task, which is affected by an important number of internal and external factors that influence the dynamics of the energy system. It is critical to investigate and understand how a specific policy instrument affects various sectors and to employ model-based scenarios to examine potential environmental and energy-related trends influenced by uncertain dynamics.

In this report, we have strived for the development of a comprehensive set of narratives and scenarios that will be used in the upcoming modeling exercises to produce outcomes related to the assessment of the decarbonization potential of the energy citizenship concept. In order to reach our goal, we explored the literature around the development of decarbonization narratives and scenarios, using as a starting point insights from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C (SR1.5) and the concept of Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) to produce the most up-to-date and policy-relevant evidence on the contribution of energy citizenship in reaching climate neutrality.

In particular, the five SSPs present a set of five qualitative descriptions of future changes in demographics, human development, economy and lifestyle, policies and institutions, technology, and environment and natural resources:

• SSP1: “Sustainability-Taking the Green Road”
• SSP2: “Middle of the Road”
• SSP3: “Regional Rivalry-A Rocky Road”
• SSP4: “Inequality-A Road Divided”
• SSP5: “Fossil-fueled Development-Taking the Highway”

Based on the SSPs, we formulated three narratives, which describe future systemic changes of the society and economy in general, providing with “future worlds” that will be inhabited by citizens:

1. “A unified world” (Citizens at the core of the energy transition, inclusive development).
2. “A fragmented world” (Regional conflicts, countries prioritize domestic issues).
3. “A familiar world” (Reference narrative).

In parallel, we brought the citizens to the forefront with the aim of also building “people-centric” narratives, based on energy citizenship trends & patterns previously identified:

1. “Power to the People” (Active participation in the energy market).
2. “Band Together” (Collective expressions of energy citizenship).
3. “Habitual Creatures” (Actions towards energy efficiency).
4. “People to the Streets” (Political activities).
5. “Business as usual” (Reference narrative).

Finally, as a next step, and through the combination of “future worlds” and “people-centric” narratives, we will formulate specific quantitative scenarios, which will be modeled with the use of the ENCLUDE modeling ensemble, i.e., the Agent-based Technology adOption Model (ATOM), the Dynamic high-Resolution dEmand-sidE Management (DREEM) model, and the Integrated Model to Assess the Global Environment (IMAGE).

Analyzing two collective actions from the United States—the civil rights movement and the fall of the tobacco industry—brings valuable insights that may be applied to the energy transition context. More specifically, the two case studies show the different transformation pathways through which change happens at a large scale. These collective actions are also centered around different resources – cigarettes as a tangible product, and justice as a non-tangible resource. As the energy transition has elements from both collective actions, the insights from the analysis may be related not only to the use of technology and the related practices but also to the justice elements found within the changes that need to be carried out in the future.

The ENCLUDE Academy for Energy Citizen Leadership is a six-month, online leadership development and civic engagement program for decarbonization. It brings together current and future changemakers from across Europe, Africa and Canada to help them hone their individual leadership, their collective organization skills and to connect them to one another and to experts in the energy transition. It aims to help people who are interested in making a change in their own communities, to not only reduce carbon emissions, but also to link up issues related to the energy transition with improving the overall well-being of their communities. It is for people who want to realize concrete ideas they already have related to the energy transition, and for those who would like to become more active in this area and to start finding that idea. 

This deliverable sets out to describe the objectives, rationale, structure and activities of the program. In addition, it offers an initial view of the video materials, in the form of the script that will be used, as input for the plenary sessions of the program. These videos serve as only one of many components for supporting learning during the ENCLUDE Academy, in addition to group discussions, implementation of ideas within communities and mentoring sessions with local experts. However, the videos offer a concrete view into the themes and the specific knowledge that will be shared during the course of the program. 

The ENCLUDE Academy bridges academic knowledge and useable knowledge for the citizens who are ready to be change agents for the energy transition. This transdisciplinary approach to social learning goes beyond informing the public of information that they were previously unaware of, but also asks participants to share their own expertise on related topics. It also provides them with time, structure and means to contextualize this knowledge and perspectives. Key for the design of the Academy is the recognition of heterogeneity in energy needs and in the circumstances in which citizens live and work. In order to create knowledge that is usable and that can contribute to systemic transformation, it is important to design a two-way process where citizens help us contextualize this knowledge. The ENCLUDE Academy aims to have an impact by creating and using this mode of engagement for catalyzing change. 

ENCLUDE will develop an open-access web platform to synthesize the outcomes of the project in a form that is useful for and usable by the project’s audience. The ENCLUDE Platform will be based on I2AM PARIS, a data exchange platform for climate modeling that was developed during the Horizon 2020 Paris Reinforce project. This report contains information about project methodologies and data inputs that are relevant to document in the Platform, along with different protocols for synthesizing project outputs. First, a typology of energy citizenship will be integrated in an interactive form, allowing users to explore all its different dimensions. Similarly, the Platform will include the case studies of Collective Energy Initiatives that are analyzed by ENCLUDE and will host a set of energy citizen profiles based on clustering results of large population surveys. The Platform will also visualize the decarbonization potential and co-benefits of collective energy actions for these citizen clusters. Furthermore, the report discusses three protocols to synthesize project outcomes, based on a modular, interlinked, and layered architecture. During the next months, we aim to contact relevant stakeholders such as local policymakers, participants of the ENCLUDE Academy, and representatives of Collective Energy Initiatives for feedback on the design of the Platform. After ENCLUDE’s end, the platform will be taken over by two Horizon Europe projects, providing a lifetime of at least until the end of 2026, while further avenues for the sustainability of the platform will be also examined.

This report is the second update to ENCLUDE’s initial strategy for the communication, dissemination, and exploitation (CDE) of information and results of the project to relevant audiences. The report first defines the scope of communication, dissemination, and exploitation in the context of ENCLUDE and sets the CDE targets of the project. The overall targets of the project include a tailored approach to convey ENCLUDE’s key messages and efforts towards inclusive and gender-sensitive messages and communication means. The report also sets quantifiable indicators for specific activities that are monitored such as achieving 15 media articles in the project’s course. Next, the report identifies the target audiences of the project, ranging from individual citizens and environmental, climate, and civil society NGOs to policymakers, scientists, and private sector entities. In order to reach these different groups, a diverse selection of promotional channels is suggested. The promotional channels to reach them include the project’s website, an Interactive Policy Platform with tailor-made information about project outcomes, social media (e.g., Twitter and LinkedIn), synergies with other relevant projects, and more. A visual identity and a logo for the project have been developed and used in the design of the project website and promotional materials including articles, infographics, videos, and presentations. The plan concludes by listing implemented promotional activities during the first and second year of the project, reporting progress towards CDE indicators, and outlining next steps for improving dissemination. A report summarizing all CDE activities of the project will be released in Month 36.