What would you expect of a guidebook on public engagement for emerging energy technologies? On 28 October 2026, the Public Engagement Task of Users TCP hosted an expert workshop to discuss this. Together with experts from research and practice, we stress-tested our draft guidelines for public engagement on renewable hydrogen, carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) and advanced nuclear.
These technologies are moving from national strategies to real sites, yet most people have barely heard of them. Our own survey of more than 2,400 respondents in Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom found that more than half had never heard of CCUS. At the same time, many people want a say: depending on the technology and country, between 22% and 59% of respondents would engage with the development of a local project. Guidance on how to engage them well is therefore timely.
How the workshop worked
The draft guidelines bring together three strands of the Task’s Phase 2 research: a review of 155 publications, the cross-country survey, and more than 30 interviews with experts from industry, academia and policymaking, as well as local civil society representatives. They build on the Engage4Energy guidelines for renewables and grids, developed in Phase 1.
After a short walkthrough of the draft, participants worked in two rounds of breakout sessions. In the first, they discussed the engagement principles that apply across technologies: what works, what does not, and what is missing. In the second, groups took one technology each and asked whether the guidance reflects its risks, justice questions, siting realities and framing. A final plenary session tested the draft checklist against concrete cases that participants brought from their own work.
Five takeaways across technologies
1. Early engagement does not guarantee positive outcomes. Participants agreed that engaging early matters but warned that it can backfire if it is not grounded in trust and reliability. People may also not want to engage until there is something concrete to engage with. At the same time, the fear among developers of “waking sleeping dogs” is often unfounded: experience from engagement on underground heat storage showed that engagement tended to increase both understanding and support (Kechagia et al., forthcoming PUSH-IT deliverable D2.4).
2. Close the feedback loop. Several participants asked the same questions: at what point can public input still change a decision? How do developers or authorities explain which suggestions they take up and which they reject? And how can we tell whether people felt heard? Regular and formalised feedback sessions, tailored to local settings throughout a project, with clear expectations were seen as one way to build long-lasting trust.
3. Go beyond the usual suspects. Engagement tends to select itself: those who take part are either already active in the energy sector, or firmly opposed to the project. Reaching others takes active recruitment, attention to people who find it hard to attend meetings, and co-creative formats. Participants also shared good experiences with role play, where people take on a stakeholder’s perspective, and with intergenerational co-designed projects.
4. Engage across projects, not one at a time. Communities experience energy infrastructure as a whole: a nuclear plant, a wind farm and a new grid line may all affect the same place. Participants highlighted an example where a community was engaged on nuclear, renewables and grids together, and saw integration across projects as a key message for the guidelines.
5. Fairness works at different scales. Those who host infrastructure near their homes should benefit most. But participants also asked who benefits beyond the locality, up to European level, and noted that how people perceive a project’s impacts, and how fair they find both the process and the distribution of costs and benefits, can differ depending on how close they live to it. Which aspects matter most where may depend on the context and the technology.
Each technology raises its own questions
Renewable hydrogen: is it really green? The hydrogen group found that the debate quickly turns to where the electricity comes from. Producing hydrogen from renewables needs more land for wind and solar, which raises its own siting and benefit questions. Participants also called for more attention to the risks of different storage options, to whether new infrastructure is needed or existing networks can be reused, and to the wider supply chain, including raw materials.
CCUS: storage out of sight. For CCUS, capture and storage are perceived very differently. Capture usually happens at existing industrial plants, where jobs are at stake; storage brings no jobs and happens out of sight. Invisible underground storage creates a need for trust building and transparency, and participants warned that companies staying silent on how storage sites are chosen risk a boomerang effect of distrust. Framing matters too: people dislike the idea of waste, but like the idea of avoiding it, so presenting CCUS as waste disposal can undermine the whole narrative.
Advanced nuclear: “what about the waste”? In the nuclear group, waste was described as “the” question, with no final repository yet in places like Sweden or the United Kingdom. Communities that already host nuclear plants tend to be more relaxed than those that do not. Therefore, engagement needs to be framed differently for each. Participants also pointed out that “advanced nuclear” covers many reactor types with different waste profiles, that what the electricity is used for (for example, data centres) shapes acceptance, and that changes of government can shift national direction quickly.
What’s next?
The workshop provided a clear picture of where the draft holds and where it needs work. The Task lead is now revising the guidelines with participants’ input, including new examples for the guidelines’ case boxes.
The final guidelines will be presented in a Users TCP Academy webinar on 25 November 2026. Register here.
A warm thank you to all participants for their time, openness and expertise.
Workshop participants included, among others, Merryn Thomas (University of Exeter) , Magdalini Kechagia (ARU), Cecilia Wallmark (LTU), Matthews Philip (nuleaf), Christian Schützenhofer (AIT), and Dipali Ambasna (DESNZ).