Formulation of CET Strategies
What are Clean Energy Transition Plans?
Clean Energy Transition (CET) Plans comprise a projection of future energy demands and supply system transition scenarios that are consistent with expected socio-economic development pathways and decarbonization ambitions. They reflect local energy demand patterns across energy demand sectors, and preconditions for decarbonization that are characterized by local renewable energy supply potentials, potentials for energy efficiency improvement and the availability of funding and labor force.
The visions and pathways formulated in this strategy and co-created by local stakeholders subsequently need to be translated in to planning decisions embedded in local governance frameworks, planning instruments, and implementation plans.
PLENTY-Life approach to the formulation of CET Strategies
At its core, the development of Clean Energy Transition (CET) Plans for municipalities builds on the data collected for the municipal profiles and an iterative co-creation process with local stakeholders that involves several workshops.
The capacity building workshops, supported by capacity building material found in the PLENTY-Life website (link), aim to empower local stakeholders to effectively participate in co-creation workshops, through the establishment of basic knowledge on the local interrelations between spatial planning and energy infrastructure. They further disseminate the immediate results of the data collection process and development of municipal profiles among the local stakeholders.
In the next step, future socio-economic development scenarios for the municipality are defined in co-creation with local stakeholders. The aim is to identify potential and likely development trajectories for socio-economic and technological drivers that influence energy demands and spatial requirements.
The modeling approaches in PLENTY-Life combine these anticipated future developments with the established baseline municipal profile and local potential for (renewable) energy supply to derive a projection of useful and final energy demands that are to be met by local energy supply infrastructure. This development of integrated energy demand and supply scenarios is conducted in the framework of future visioning workshops, and it is additionally driven by requirements introduced by local national and regional energy policy drivers, e.g., decarbonization targets, or zoning for renewable energy use.
By directly abstracting the implications of certain scenario drivers via the PLENTY-Life energy modeling tools, a feedback learning loop between planning objectives, perceived values and their implications on decarbonization efforts can be established.
The application of planning instruments that directly target energy supply infrastructure, e.g., heating and cooling grids requires a close integration of local energy utility companies into this process.
Following the CET implementation plans and translation into local planning instruments, a KPI based monitoring concept to track the actual development alongside the envisioned clean energy transition pathway must be setup.
To find out more and see the results of PLENTY-Life pilots, click here.