Evaluating the Performance of the Regional Living Lab Concept on Integrated Sustainable Energy Planning

Substantial research effort has been devoted on the importance of integrating energy into spatial planning and even more to embed their synergy in the regional value and production/consumption chains, in order to develop less vulnerable to failure and to societal resistance energy projects. Inspired by these findings, a methodological approach for holistic energy planning on a regional/local level was developed under the INTENSSS-PA project (HORIZON2020 Programme). The core of this methodology lies on the Regional Living Lab (RLL) approach, including multiple aspects such as the development of spatial concepts, new co-creating strategies, business cases, societal alliances, and institutional changes and formats. The objective of this paper is to develop and operationalize a methodological framework for evaluating: (i) the overall performance of the proposed Integrated Sustainable Energy Planning methodology, (ii) the performance of the energy plan, and (iii) the performance of the INTENSSS-PA RLL as an environment for integrated sustainable energy planning and the performance of the INTENSSS-PA RLLs in relation to the LL’s essentials. The evaluation methodology is applied on the case study of the RLL established by the Junta de Castilla y Leon in Spain, showing the related performance results.