Co-Creation for Sustainable Energy Transition: A Case Study of Local Energy Cooperatives in the Metropolitan Region Rotterdam The Hague

The irreversible effects of climate change have led to a significant increase in citizen-led and initiated local energy cooperatives. Playing a crucial role in the shift to renewable energy, these cooperatives are evolving from informal community groups to structured organisations. Their success relies on co-creation, a collaborative process in...

Modelling just transition pathways to climate neutrality

A notable inclusion in the most recent mitigation assessment from the IPCC was the need for a broader societal transformation to achieve the Paris Agreement temperature goals in a fair and equitable manner. Energy system models are becoming increasingly important in politics when it comes to informing the energy transition towards climate...

Youth participation in the energy transition: Designing a new approach

In 2015, due to decentralisations in the social domain, municipalities became the key public authorities for youth participation in the Netherlands (RAND Europe, 2021). One year later 66% had made youth participation a policy goal, while 18% was planning to. At that time most municipalities involved young people to some extend in their policy...

The Influence of Polycentric Governance on Co-Creation in the Heating Transition: An Explorative Case Study of Middelburg

According to the Dutch Climate Agreement, each municipality has to formulate its heating transition vision strategy by the end of 2021. In the strategy, each municipality has to show how it will make its municipality natural gas-free, specifies the technology that will be implemented and describes the timeline for each of its neighborhoods. This...

Co-creation as a social process for unlocking sustainable heating transitions in Europe

Providing heat is a key aspect of social life and a necessity for comfort and health in cold climates. Even though heat accounts for a large proportion of worldwide carbon emissions and is the largest energy end-use, it has remained largely untouched by efforts to decarbonize. Efforts to do so meet significant economic, social-psychological,...

Inter-Organizational Co-Creation: An Approach to Support Energy Transition Projects

Societal challenges such as climate change and inefficiency of energysystems more and more crave for a sustainable environment. Research proved thatrestructuring energy systems into more sustainable forms, called “Energy Transition”, has faced challenges. How to deal with these challenges requires the cocreation between various actors with...

Designing the Future to Predict the Future: An ‘urban-first’ approach to co-creating zero-carbon neighbourhoods

The natural ecotone between people, community and carbon reduction is the zero-carbon community. Over recent decades, the design of zero-carbon communities has focussed too greatly on carbon emissions and not enough on building communities. Anthropogenic climate change is a human problem, yet people are seldom placed at the centre of design...

Local authority web portals for the adoption of low-carbon technologies by homeowners: Evaluation report Triple-A

Through the Interreg2Seas Triple-A project, seven Local Authorities (LAs) identified and developed a set of modules for strengthening LA web portals for increasing awareness and easy access for housing retrofit, to encourage homeowners across four European Countries (Belgium, France, Netherlands and UK) to adopt different low-carbon technologies...

Co-creation, control or compliance? How Dutch community engagement professionals view their work

Most literature on community engagement (CE) focuses on why and how local communities respond to energy projects or technologies. There has been very limited attention to project developers and the way they shape CE in the literature. We address this gap by focusing on the work of professionals active within or for energy companies, who are...

Co-creating Responsible Energy Systems

Energy system projects in countries like India are often failing. Not only because of technical or economical barriers, but mainly institutional and social issues are at the base of these failures. A co-creation, or participatory, process to align all demands and requirements of the different stakeholders is required. This paper takes...

Proof of the Pudding: Applying the City-Zen Methodology to Other European Cities.

Back in 2012, a group of enthusiasts submitted a project proposal to the EU. Many talks, partner proposals, and city explorations later, City-zen was granted EU-funding “to develop and demonstrate energy efficient cities and to build a methodology and tools for cities, industries and citizens to reach the 20-20-20 targets”. The program, rooted...

Co-designing the distribution network operator’s customer service for energy collectives

In the Netherlands more and more groups of volunteers are formed who collectively establish sustainable energy producing initiatives. The customer needs of these so-called sustainable energy collectives are unlike any other customer groups of distribution network operator Stedin. Their applications for grid connections often require case...

The Participation Triangle: Involving Generation Y in energy strategy

The liberalization of the Dutch energy market has led to a change of relation between energy companies and their customers. At the same time, the Dutch energy policy expects energy companies to contribute to an energy supply that is cleaner, smarter and more varied, and available at any time at affordable prices. The situation since the...