D4.1: Guidelines for user recruitment and engagement

This deliverable is part of the EU Horizon funded InterPED project (InterPED, 2024). The InterPED project is developing an ICT control platform for Positive Energy Districts. Understanding participation strategies that will assist with recruiting participants, building energy community social capital and entrepreneurship, and allow user-centric design of PED flexibility is a critical component of the project research activity.

Public participation in environmental decision-making is a legal right in Europe, this principle established by the Aarhus Convention in 1998. Over the subsequent decades it has been recognised that participation is not only a matter of justice and democracy but also a practical necessity for transitioning to sustainability. Energy system transition is based around electricity sector decarbonisation, electrification of mobility and heat, and development of distributed smart grid infrastructure where ownership and governance is partially transferred to communities and citizens. It is assumed that the users of this transitioned energy system, rather than being passive, will actively participate through ownership, governance and as input to system design and control. This active participation is welcomed as it is likely to create more accurate problem diagnosis, legitimacy in solution, and citizen empowerment whilst contributing towards socio-economic change (Huttunen et al., 2022). Explicitly then, the form of active participation eventually anticipated in these decentralised energy systems extends well beyond the energy user acting as a consumer. 

Conceptual frameworks will be required that can assist energy users to make this transition from passive and disinterested to some form of active interest. To be useful, these frameworks will have to encompass a community energy space that is evolving, varied and non-structured. Its heterogeneity has technical, economic and social dimensions with community energy projects displaying a wide variety of techno-economic scope and level of activity expected by energy users. In addition, recent EU policy initiatives associated with decentralised energy systems have introduced a set of terminology whose meanings are still being negotiated between expert stakeholders, academic researchers, and energy users. This includes citizen energy communities, renewable energy communities and positive energy districts. A review of definitions of the terms community and citizen was conducted here in conjunction with an understanding of project scope and typology expected of energy communities. A series of participatory techniques that have been deployed in energy community projects and research were also reviewed. 

Learnings from these were used to develop bespoke participatory frameworks for each of the InterPED pilots, that took account of project, locale and citizen specificity. These are defined here as inputs to workshops that are currently being conducted and whose outputs in conjunction with the conceptual discussions included in this deliverable will allow more rounded participatory strategies to be defined for each pilot in a later deliverable.

The output from the reviews also contributed towards the conceptual development of a more generic participatory framework, designed to accommodate the breadth of scope found in the literature associated with meanings and project typology of decentralised energy systems. This novel conceptual framework is proposed here as an initial thought piece, to be evaluated more thoroughly as the InterPED project progresses.

Long-term solutions to the development of these participatory frameworks are required if the energy community concept is to reach its full socio-technical potential. The solution to this problem is likely to be interdisciplinary, requiring the integration of thought styles, pieces of knowledge, practices and ideas of indigenous citizens, energy system engineers and built environment specialists. This will bring forward two new sets of knowledge. The first of these involves creating a typological description of the local energy system project, understandable and agreed by all parties, achieved through processes of balance and consensus. This can be facilitated through a modified version of a community classification scheme that is present in the literature (Hicks & Ison, 2018), amended here in Section 5. The second involves
recasting descriptions of participatory techniques, applicable to citizens and local energy system projects. These techniques have been codified in existing observatories, whose design and structure has been configured for technology or participatory experts rather than consumers, energy-users or citizens. Simultaneously, the language used to describe these techniques such that they are understood by non-experts can also be configured to allow the production of suggestions in response to project/citizen metadata to be automated. Project typological description can be configured using similar lexicography to permit this automation to proceed. This would also require the development of a transparent assessment process that can be used to ensure that the automated suggestions made by the process overtime become better suited to the project typology. This form of strategy creation would transfer its ownership from the research group to the users, overcoming one of the key shortcomings of processes deployed to date.

Further conceptual development work is required to improve participatory strategies designed to be owned and governed by participants, over the lifetime of their involvement in the energy community. This is critical to take account of the nature of energy communities of all forms, intended to be disruptive systems within regional and national energy systems and therefore exist for a long period of time. The imaginary of a journey was introduced here to describe how citizens move from a consumer centric vision of participation through stages towards activities that encompass the necessary aspects of justice and equity if the low carbon transition is to address climate change appropriately. Participatory strategies are required that support the citizen on this journey.