Report: Social acceptance and public engagement in emerging energy infrastructure projects
This report provides a literature review of 155 publications to reveal critical acceptance and engagement factors and principles.
Mapping understandings of corporate social and sustainability responsibility in an era of green transition in Swedish Sápmi: recommendations for extractive industry improvements
In northern Sweden, extractive industry activity, such as wind power and mining, has intensified due to the so-called green transition. Hence, friction between the Indigenous Sámi people and extractive companies has increased. The objective of this study is to explore the experiences of and recommendations for corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices in extractive industries among the Sámi people in Sweden.
Evaluating Electric Vehicle and Heat Pump Flexibility Potential: Linking Technology, Economics, Regulation, Behaviour and Policy
In a report, commissioned by the Users TCP and 4E TCP EDNA Platform, the Austrian Institute of Technology explores how flexibility can be understood, quantified, and enabled in practice. The report introduces a high-level model that links technical capabilities, economic drivers, behavioural aspects, and policy frameworks to estimate the overall flexibility potential of distributed assets.
Battling Exclusion in Energy Transitions
Energy transitions are leading to a decentralization of energy system resources. However, power structures remain highly centralized and supply-side focused, often leading to local resistance to change and the exclusion of end user groups. This policy report summarizes key findings, recommendations and examples based on work in the Empowering All Task phase 1, including new research, good practice examples, and the aggregated knowledge of current state of the art research within the energy field.
HTR Task – Energy hardship programmes: a systematic cross-country policy analysis of initiatives addressing equity and low-carbon energy services
This study aims to address the knowledge gap in energy hardship literature by providing a systematic analysis of a sample of 67 energy hardship programmes implemented across Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and more than 20 European countries. Guided by specific research questions and supported by directed content analysis, we focus on five areas: dominant policy rationales, main policy goals, supportive policy instruments, stakeholders, and key performance indicators (KPIs).
2024/25 Annual Report
The 2024/25 Annual Report is now available to view in an online version. This report provides an overview of the activities of the Users TCP and its Task during the 2024/25 year.
HTR Task – Unintended Consequences Report
This report is the first major milestone of Year 1 Phase 2 of the Hard-to-Reach Energy Users Task. It delves deeply, via mixed methods research, into the question why well-intentioned energy
interventions don’t always turn out the way they were intended.
Making an inclusive and gender aware energy policy
This paper presents a synthesis of three case studies carried out within the sub-task 2 of the Gender and Energy Research Programme with some supporting evidence from other sources. The sub-task set out to gain an understanding of the systematic inertias in the sociotechnical energy system hindering the formation of gender aware policies and interventions and then to identify ways of countering the inertias.
Facilitating Community – Industry Engagement in Aotearoa New Zealand
This research, funded by the Electricity Retailers Association New Zealand (ERANZ), will inform Subtask 5 of Phase 2 (Co-Design of Engagement Strategies For Chosen Priority Audiences) of the HTR Task.
Expert Survey Results. Phase 2 Subtask 2 – Energy Justice Landscape & Stakeholder Analysis
This report summarises the findings from our HTR Task Phase 2 Subtask 2 expert survey. 72 experts from 16 countries answered our Qualtrics survey (ran from November 2023 to March 2024), providing insights into their experiences with hidden energy users, energy justice and just transition programmes, engagement with community and Indigenous organisations, and examples of unintended consequences they encountered. The latter informed our Unintended Consequences report, the major milestone of Year 1 of Phase 2.
Policy Brief – Gender Just Energy Policy
The overarching aim of the EmPOWERing All task is to bring science-based evidence on how to formulate and implement clean, effective and inclusive energy policy and technological interventions, building on perspectives from gender research. This policy brief provides an introduction on how to address and assess energy policy using the gender just energy policy framework.
SLA2.0 Task Final Report
The final report from the Social License to Automate 2.0 Task has been published and is now available to download.
Policy Brief – Emerging Best Practices for Campaign Design and Implementation
The CampaignXchange Task fostered knowledge sharing among governments, collected campaign results and data and identified best practices for future public campaign design and implementation.
The Task emerged from the collective interest of policymakers to assess the outcomes and features of behavioural interventions in response to the 2022 energy crisis.
Case Study – Smart Energy Systems: How to Achieve More Inclusive Technology Development?
Austrian Case Study: Smarte Energiesysteme: Wie eine inklusivere Technologieentwicklung erreicht werden kann (in German)
Factsheet – Focus on Usage: Smart Energy Systems
Austrian Factsheet – Die Nutzung im Fokus: Smarte Energiesysteme (in German)
Thirty-five years of research on energy and power: A landscape analysis
Highlights from this paper:
-An overview of research centred on users and inclusion in energy transitions.
-Work on energy users and justice largely overlooks gender and class differences.
-Mainstream perspectives overlook diversity and richness within social categories.
-Policy-oriented work on users in inclusive energy transitions needs better evidence.
-Important contributions come from non-Western scholars, contexts and epistemologies.
HTR Task Summary of National Expert Workshop in Boston (June 2024)
These are the summary meeting minutes from the Hard-to-Reach Energy Users Task hui (workshop) in Boston (June 6, 2024). We focused on elevating Indigenous voices, who are top priority communities to involve in the just energy transition efforts in the three countries participating in the HTR Task.
A conceptual analysis of gendered energy care work and epistemic injustice through a case study of Zanzibar’s Solar Mamas
Energy and climate transitions bear an inherent risk of replicating historically embedded unjust gendered norms in the current energy regimes. Positioning our work within critical feminist scholarship, our study emphasizes the embedded nature of energy technologies within respective socio-economic, institutional and cultural contexts. We argue that interventions prioritizing care and knowledge in decentralized, locally managed energy provisioning have the potential to disrupt established gender relations.
Gender & Energy Task: Netherlands case study
This case study contributes to providing an understanding of the systematic inertias in the sociotechnical energy system that appear to be hindering the development and implementation of gender aware energy policies. The case study focuses on a condition known as ‘energy poverty’ and how it is currently addressed in the context of the Netherlands.
Policy Brief – How to meaningfully engage the public in energy infrastructure projects
The Public Engagement for Energy Infrastructure Task identifies challenges and drivers for effective public engagement practices and gathers evidence from international case studies on meaningful engagement approaches and formats to increase social acceptance of energy infrastructure projects.