Energy citizenship: Must or myth? The impact of citizen participation on local energy systems
Thursday September 8th, 2022 | 9h - 12:15h | Workshop | Hybrid
The involvement of citizens and energy communities (energy citizenship) is seen as a key pillar in the energy transition. Citizens interact with the technical, economical, and social energy systems; they are both subject and object of social innovation in the energy society and are emerging economic actors in the energy markets. However, how to design and optimize energy policies that enable different levels of citizen’s participation in accelerating the energy transition, is still unclear. Also, the assessment of the potential impacts of energy citizenship is still under defined.
The workshop aimed at presenting and discussing the methods, strategies and expected impacts for citizen engagement applied in seven different research and innovation projects in the area of Positive Energy Districts. The workshop presented the different citizen engagement frameworks, models and strategies, their impact and lessons learned, and explored how important citizen engagement really is for the success of new energy concepts. Also discussed was the question of how to assess and compare the impact of citizen engagement strategies across projects.
Participating projects (ATELIER, +CityxChange, ENERGE, MakingCity, Pocityf , Bright).
Session Chairs: Sander Smit, R2M Solution
Topics discussed included:
- Conceptual Models for Mapping Citizen Engagement Strategies – Manuel Aires de Matos and Bianca Banica, POCITYF
- CommunityxChange as a toolkit for empowered energy citizenship – The +CityxChange approach, Helena Fitzgerald, +CityxChange
- Practical experiences with applied research on energy citizenship in positive energy districts – Mark van Wees, ATELIER
- Energy citizenship in secondary schools: context literacy in taking personal and collective actions – Natalia Romero Herrera, ENERGE
- Citizen engagement strategies and tools for district approaches in the energy transition – Cyril Tjahja and Beril Balpagut, Making-City
- Tenant engagement strategies – how to develop participation and communication strategies with and for tenants, Joke Kort, POCITYF
- Citizen and consumer engagement in the development of Demand – Response instruments, Joke Kort and Annemarie Mink, BRIGHT
- “Sustainable Energy Communities” A UNESCO outlook in SD programmes for the promotion of clean energy use and production – Marco Raugi, UNESCO