Engaging young people for a more inclusive national energy transition: A participatory modelling framework

TL;DR

This paper introduces a participatory modelling framework that incorporates youth perspectives into Norway's energy transition planning, revealing significant impacts on system design and emphasizing the importance of inclusive stakeholder engagement.

Contribution

It presents a novel workshop-informed modelling approach that integrates youth insights into national energy system models, promoting inclusive and democratic energy planning.

Findings

Youth priorities significantly alter renewable capacity projections.

System costs vary notably based on youth-driven scenarios.

Engaging youth can influence regional equity and technology mix outcomes.

Abstract

Participatory research in energy system modelling can generate bottom-up knowledge to explore co-designed future net-zero energy system scenarios. However, it often fails to facilitate collective learning, explore explicitly informed perspectives, and frequently ignores underrepresented groups like youth, among whom distrust about the energy transformation process is growing. By modifying a national electricity system model to reflect young people's socio-techno-environmental insights gathered through school workshops, this study presents a framework for envisioning future net-zero power systems in Norway. Given pupil priorities regarding certain power system aspects and their cumulative impact, substantial shifts occur in national renewable capacity potentials (approximately plus or minus 50%), system costs (-7% to +25%), technology mixes (notably onshore wind from 40% to 0%), transmission capacities (near doubling), and regional equity assessments. We find that costly youth-driven system designs do not necessarily guarantee equitable systems. Although applied to young people in Norway, the proposed workshop-informed modelling framework serves as a tool to meaningfully engage diverse groups and capture their perspectives, thereby further democratising energy system planning. The approach is expected to help address social acceptance challenges through enhanced understanding of trade-offs in the energy transformation process.