Abstract
Various countries have pledged to carry out system-wide energy transitions to address climate change. This requires taking strategic decisions with long-term consequences under conditions of considerable uncertainty. For this reason, many actors in the energy sector develop model-based scenarios to guide debates and decision-making about plausible future energy systems. Besides being a decision support instrument for policy-makers, energy scenarios are widely recognized as a way of shaping the expectations of experts and of influencing energy policy more generally. However, relatively little is known about how energy scenarios shape preferences and expectations of the public. We use an explorative research design to assess the publics' expectations of future energy systems through an online survey among Swiss residents (N = 797). We identified four significantly different clusters of people with distinct expectations about the future energy system, each seeing different implications for the acceptability of energy policies and the compatibility with projections of techno-economic energy scenarios. Cluster 1 expects a system-wide energy transition towards renewable energy sources that is similar to the policy-relevant national energy scenario. Cluster 2 also expects an energy transition, but believes it will lead to a range of technical challenges, societal conflicts and controversies with neighboring countries. Cluster 3 is the only cluster not expecting significant changes in the future energy system and thus not anticipating an energy transition. Cluster 4's expectations are between cluster 1 and 2, but it anticipates a huge increase in per capita electricity demand while prices are expected to remain low. The study at hand offers some initial insights into the interdependencies between energy transition pathways outlined in techno-economic energy scenarios and the energy system expectations of the public. These insights are essential for gaining a better understanding of whether and how energy scenarios can contribute to informed public debates about energy futures and how desirable pathways towards them might look like.
Highlights
1.1 Energy scenarios & public discourseVarious countries have pledged to carry out system-wide energy transitions to address climate change [1]
We address the following research questions: i) What are the public’s expectations about the techno-economic development of the energy system and how stable are they in the face of different time horizons and framings? ii) Are there different types of expectations towards the future energy system that can be identified among the public? iii) How do the public’s energy system expectations relate to projections made in the policy-relevant energy scenario? In this way, our socio-scientific perspective provides empirical evidence of interdependencies between the formalized projections of techno-economic energy scenarios and the informal expectations of the energy future among the public
A significant share of the population is familiar with energy policyrelated promises and concerns, and even the lengthy planning timeframes associated with an energy transition
Summary
Various countries have pledged to carry out system-wide energy transitions to address climate change [1] This requires taking strategic decisions with long-term consequences under conditions of considerable uncertainty [2]. Public and private actors often publish the results of scenario studies to legitimize decisions, increase the transparency of decision-making, and to direct energy policy debate towards a particular vision of the energy future [9]. These energy scenarios exceed the typical time horizon of political processes by extending to the year 2050 and beyond, thereby implying the relevance of the socio-technical configuration of the energy system in the distant future as a basis for contemporary planning [10]
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