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Abstract
For a successful transition to low-carbon electricity supply, public support is essential. Citizen preferences are best understood in the process of informed citizen panels, where citizens are informed about the pros and cons of various electricity technologies and spend time reflecting on the trade-offs. We investigated how information about electricity technologies and their sustainability impacts can change citizens’ preferences and affect for the complete Swiss electricity mix 2035. The citizens received information as factsheets and, during workshops, discussed in groups and built their preferred electricity mix using an interactive tool. The informed citizen panel (N = 33) in the Swiss city of Geneva showed high support for domestic renewable technologies and end-use efficiency, as well as low support for net electricity import, natural gas, and nuclear power. Preferences and affect for unfamiliar technologies changed after receiving information and remained stable even in the longer term four weeks after. Preferences and affect for already familiar technologies, like hydropower, barely changed. The same procedure in the two Swiss cities of Geneva and Zurich (N = 46) enabled the identification of robust support for renewable technologies and efficiency with only minor context-specific differences.
Highlights
The mitigation of climate change through the promotion of low-carbon energy technologies is an issue on many political agendas after the Paris Agreement
Citizen preferences are best understood in the process of informed citizen panels, where citizens are informed about the sustainability pros and cons of various electricity technologies and spend time reflecting on the trade-offs [7,8,9]
Initial and informed preferences showed high levels of support for hydropower (M = 5.7 ± 1.6 for large run-of-river; M = 5.3 ± 1.7 for large dams; M = 5.3 ± 2.4 for small hydropower), solar cells (M = 5.7 ± 1.3), and wind power (M = 5.5 ± 1.8), and no significant changes were observed between survey #1 and survey #3
Summary
Swiss Energy Strategy 2050 has been adopted after the public referendum in 2017, with the three aims of phasing out of nuclear power and increasing the uptake of renewable energy and end-use efficiency measures [2]. Implementation of the Energy Strategy 2050 should be in line with the perspectives of citizens [3,4], whereas the Swiss option for public-initiated referenda is an additional powerful tool to influence the political progress [5,6]. Citizen preferences are best understood in the process of informed citizen panels, where citizens are informed about the sustainability pros and cons of various electricity technologies and spend time reflecting on the trade-offs [7,8,9] In this way, the misconceptions and knowledge gaps can be reduced, leading to more robust preferences that are better aligned with the actual value judgements of the citizens and constitute better benchmarks for decision making than uninformed preferences [9,10,11]
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