In the Netherlands, a complex heat transition is taking place. Currently, the country's built environment largely relies on natural gas for heating. By 2050, the housing sector should, in principle, be free of this fuel. Changes in laws, policies, regulations, and technical solutions to achieve this goal will be challenging. Their implementation will require coordination and even cooperation between building owners (i.e. group decisions), as well as taking into account households' bounded financial rationality, households' heterogeneous decision criteria and preferences, and uncertainties introduced by changes in formal institutions. This dissertation explores these challenges from the perspectives of socio-technical systems, complex adaptive systems, and complex systems engineering. It addresses the question: How could the heat transition in the Netherlands be influenced by homeowners’ individual and group decisions regarding investment in heating systems and insulation measures? Agent-based modelling, informed by recent policy developments and scientific literature, is the main method used for answering this question. This dissertation takes the application of this method to explore the heat transition in the Netherlands one step further. “An agent-based exploration of complex heat transitions in the Netherlands” is relevant for the following three audience groups. Firstly, researchers who develop computational models to study socio-technical transitions, and in particular, heat transitions in the Netherlands. Secondly, practitioners who develop or use those computational models to offer advice to different actors. Finally, this research is relevant for anyone interested in enabling heat transitions in the Netherlands, from households and neighbourhoods who are the end users of technologies, to public actors discussing and designing policy interventions. ... Read more

Natural gas for heating is widespread in the built environment of The Netherlands, where the government aims at limiting heat demand and reducing natural gas consumption over the coming decades. In the owner-occupied residential sector, this transition is complex and requires cooperation and coordination of individuals and groups that make investment decisions. We use agent-based modelling to explore the effect that various financial policies could have in an illustrative neighbourhood, given that households make multi-criteria and group decisions. In the scientific literature, this type of energy model seldom focuses on the adoption of competing technologies by households as individual and collective agents grouped in homeowner associations in multi-family buildings. To address the problem and knowledge gaps, we model individual preferences with a multi-criteria perceived lifetime utility submodel, and decisions as outcomes of individual preferences and a threshold voting system. We explore energy taxes (natural gas and electricity), regulated price of heat from networks, and subsidies (insulation and heat pumps). Under our assumptions, we found that combinations of fiscal policies, regulated heat prices, and subsidies can sometimes create incentives for households to disconnect from natural gas, but that steering the transition mainly with financial policies could prove ineffective. We also found that, in terms of collective CO2 reduction, some transitions in which only some households phase out natural gas could have results similar to some scenarios in which households only improve their dwellings’ insulation levels. ... Read more

The Netherlands aims at reducing natural gas consumption for heating in the housing sector. Although homeowners are responsible for replacing their heating systems and improving dwelling insulation, they are not always able to make individual decisions. Some projects require group decisions within and between buildings. We use an agent-based modelling and simulation approach to explore how these individual and group decisions would influence natural gas consumption and heating costs in an illustrative neighbourhood, under a set of assumptions. We model individual household preferences over combinations of insulation and heating systems as a lifetime cost calculation with implicit discount rates, and we use quorum constraints to represent group decisions. We model three fiscal policies and a policy to disconnect all dwellings from the natural gas network. Results show that the disconnection policy was the only necessary and sufficient condition to incentivize households to replace their heating systems and that group decisions influenced the alternatives that were chosen. Since results were influenced by group decisions within buildings and by the market discount rate, we recommend further research regarding policies around these topics. Future work can apply our approach to case studies, incorporate new empirical knowledge, and explore group decisions in other contexts. ... Read more

To reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050, an energy transition is taking place in the European Union. Achieving these targets requires changes in the heating and cooling sector (H&C). Designing and implementing this energy transition is not trivial, as technology, actors, and institutions interact in complex ways. We provide an illustrative example of the development and use of an agent-based model (ABM) for thermal energy transitions in the built environment, from the perspective of sociotechnical systems (STS) and complex adaptive systems (CAS). In our illustrative example, we studied the transition of a simplified residential neighborhood to heating without natural gas. We used the ABM to explore socioeconomic conditions that could support the neighborhoods’ transition over 20 years while meeting the neighborhoods’ heat demand. Our illustrative example showed that through the use of STS, CAS, and an ABM, we can account for technology, actors, institutions, and their interactions while designing for thermal energy transitions in the built environment. ... Read more

The EU has set ambitious targets for an energy transition. While research often focuses on technology, institutions or actors, a transition requires complex coordination and comprehensive analysis and design. We propose a framework accounting for technology, institutions and actors' perspective to design in socio-technical systems. We present its application, firstly, to biodiesel production in Germany; secondly, to vehicle-to-grid contracts in a Car as a Power Plant microgrid. We show how using the framework as the core in modelling can contribute to the performance improvement of these systems. Future work will elaborate on the next generation of thermal energy systems, coordination control of microgrids and implementing flexibility through demand response aggregation. Overall, designing solutions to the problems described calls for comprehensive engineers who look beyond the technical design and deal with multi actor socio-political processes including institutional consideration. ... Read more

Modelling and simulation aim to reproduce the structure and imitate the behavior of real-life systems. For complex dynamic systems, System Dynamics (SD) and Agent-based (AB) modelling are two widely used modelling paradigms that prior to the early 2010’s have traditionally been viewed as mutually exclusive alternatives. This literature review seeks to update the work of Scholl (2001) and Macal, (2010) by providing an overview of attempts to integrate SD and AB over the last ten years. First, the building blocks of both paradigms are presented. Second, their capabilities are contrasted, in order to explore how their integration can yield insights that cannot be generated with one methodology alone. Then, an overview is provided of recent work comparing the outcomes of both paradigms and specifying opportunities for integration. Finally, a critical reflection is presented. The literature review concludes that while paradigm emulation has contributed to expanding the applications of SD, it is the dynamic combination of the two approaches that has become the most promising research line. Integrating SD and AB, and even tools and methods from other disciplines, makes it possible to avoid their individual pitfalls and, hence, to exploit the full potential of their complementary characteristics, so as to provide a more complete representation of complex dynamic systems. ... Read more