Calling on municipalities, regional and national policy experts and EU policy-makers! Join us on the 19th of January 2024 to gain valuable insights for your work to develop effective and efficient solutions to the energy transition!

After more than three years of work, the WHY project is finally coming to an end and we would like to share our final findings and results with you. We analyzed citizens' everyday choices in their energy use at home and how our energy system needs to change to be prepared for a higher share of renewable energy sources. We will also present the WHY toolkit, a flexible tool for energy and modeling experts to provide decision-making support for all level of policy makers. The Toolkit has been used and tested in the context of:

• A municipality's residential energy system: to support the energy planning of a positive energy district in a new neighbourhood in the German city of Maintal,

• The sustainability assessment of of a flexible renewable energy tariff for citizens in an energy cooperative to see if consumption and power in peak hours can be reduced, and support forecast of purchase in the wholesale electricity market.The assessment also helps to understanf potential incentives and policy interventions that contribute to increasing investments,

• Specific energy communities to show how the energy communities can lead to climate neutral cities. The WHY toolkit was used to plan the setup of an energy community from the technical, economic, environmental, and social perspective,

• Re-assessing the impact of EU-wide and national policies on achieving the EU goals on climate change mitigation and energy efficiency. This was implemented by addressing exsiting energy efficiency EE policies and measures consistent with the pathway to climate neutrality by 2050, using the improved WHY modelling capabilities.

Learn more and register:

This Policy Brief presents key lessons from the WHY project to accelerate energy efficiency and decarbonise the residential sector across new and existing homes in the EU. Key recommendations include:

• Further provide and simplify consumer savings incentives to boost energy efficiency improvements and uptake of low-carbon energy heating appliances.
• Develop and monitor a continuous roadmap for enforcement to ensure the EU member states are on track to meet the 2030 building targets.
• Energy and climate policies should consider the national climatic, socioeconomic, building type and age circumstances to maximise their effectiveness.
• Greater empowerment of energy communities can positively complement redistributive policies with active participation of energy poor.

Read more by downloading the Policy Brief:

There is no change without the local policy change. Thus we also developed recommendations for local energy policy makers and public authorities to be successful in involving citizens:

• Embrace diversity! Standardised load profiles are not representing the real people!
• Be simple. Time of use tariffs are easier to follow by humans and allow reorganising tasks at home helping to reduce its impact. 
• Be clear. The difference between the price of the energy in each period of the tariff have to be large enough to provide a clear incentive to change beha viour.
• Help people that cannot change habits. Add special provisions in the tariff system for large families and people at risk of poverty in order to reduce the impact.

Download the full Policy Brief by clicking on the button below:

WHY is the next step in improving energy demand modelling and predicting household energy consumption. The WHY project develops innovative methodologies and a toolkit for short- and long-term household energy consumption modelling. Use cases benchmark these models ranging from local to European sized energy grids.  All views are our own. The sole responsibility for the content of this Newsletter lies with the authors.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.