About this document

The report describes the implementation of the Use Cases on the WHY Toolkit, the data collected and the results of the test simulations carried out. The database is published in an open-access database (ensuring full compliance with the FAIR principles) to be reused by the stakeholders and the research community.

This report includes the definition and the development of the five Use Cases of the WHY project, which capture a wide diversity of contexts from the local to energy community,
national, European, and global level. These Use Cases play a central role in the project, as through their application in diverse situations, the WHY Toolkit and models will be tested and validated. This deliverable (D5.1) aims to provide a detailed definition for the design and development of the Use Cases, based on the soft-linkage of the WHY Toolkit with large-scale Energy System Models (ESMs). In this direction, the impacts of WHY modelling enhancements on energy and climate strategies at different jurisdiction levels are assessed from the local level up to the European and global levels.

The design of all Use Cases has been greatly benefited from the active engagement of stakeholders and end-users, including policy makers, public authorities, businesses, and
utilities. This has taken various forms, depending on the specificities of each Use Case ranging from the organisation of (online and in-person) stakeholder workshops to
interviews, focus groups on online questionnaires. In all cases, stakeholders helped to define the most important aspects, questions, and policy interventions to be assessed in
each Use Case. An active communication channel with stakeholders has been established and will be extensively used to discuss the results of the Use Cases and identify policy-
relevant recommendations.

This report also includes the relevant information needed for the implementation of the scenarios and policy interventions with the WHY Toolkit and the links with large-scale ESMs (PRIMES, TIAM-ECN, PROMETHEUS), focusing on the European and global Use Cases where the use of ESMs was identified as important. Furthermore, this report provides key input assumptions, policy framework, definitions, and policy interventions that are used for the actual development of the five Use Cases through scenario implementation, simulations, and policy impact assessment using the WHY Toolkit.

The Positive Energy District Use Case in Maintal is discussed in Chapter 2 of this report. This case study focus on the creation of a positive energy district and optimizing it for energy consumption and provision. The original Use Case was designed as a Micro-Grid Use Case in Austria's hamlet of Gniebing, but it was cancelled due to high energy prices that led to massive problems for the Gniebing Grid Operator. Then, the focus shifted to positive energy districts, which share some resemblance with microgrids. The WHY-project will assist to reduce the uncertainty by providing more detailed information on the energy consumption of the households. The Use Case is separated into three phases: draft planning phase, technical planning phase, and post-planning phase. The blackout-simulation model will be created using the Maintal data. The WHY-Toolkit generates the baseline load profiles for normal uninterrupted power supply and operation of the system, and the results of the WHY-Toolkit will provide the load profiles of the households in general but also the load profiles of the individual devices. Using the data from the survey and the preferences of the inhabitants on which devices and energy services are most important to them, a distribution of used services and devices amongst the inhabitants will be used to identify which devices will be running during the time without power supply. The distribution is then applied on the households that are part of the simulation, which will finally create a matrix. The goal is to create a self-sustainable positive energy district in Maintal, which will be achieved through the analysis of the behavioral change of the potential inhabitants in a disruption of the energy supply. The Maintal Use Case is expected to provide insights into the design and operation of future positive energy districts.

The Energy Cooperative case in Chapter 3 is focusing on the usage of the WHY-Toolkit to simulate the behavioral change of residential consumers to obtain a deeper knowledge of the load behavior of these consumers and the way they will change their behavior in response to modification of changes in the electric tariff structure. The main goal is to assess the impacts of the modification of the tariff structure, including the load profile, the purchase strategy they need to follow, and the impact on achieving long-term goals such as reducing energy consumption, increasing distributed generation assets for self-consumption, reducing energy poverty, and increasing community empowerment. The Energy Cooperative Case uses quantitative and qualitative pre-post analyses of interventions, and surveys were sent to all the partners of Goiener to gather socio-economic information of households. The validation method includes bootstrapping techniques to estimate the replicability of the results. Finally, this Case describes the scenario design with new energy and climate policies implemented to reduce emissions, improve energy efficiency, expand renewable energy generation capacity, and improve the electric system, based on specific interventions that impact the load behavior of the consumers.

The role of energy communities is discussed in Chapter 4 as a means of achieving the European Union's goal of becoming climate neutral by 2050. Energy communities can
support a clean energy transition at the local and citizen level by encouraging democratic decision-making and self-sufficiency, social innovation, and collaborative social
transformation. Energy communities can take many diverse legal, organizational, and financial forms, depending on local circumstances and needs, and the available policy and regulatory support. Energy communities have gained momentum through public investment and support schemes, and the awareness of sustainable advantages for local
populations. The main objective of this use case is to show the way that new energy community-based business models can advance the energy communities and lead to climate neutral cities. A methodology is outlined for assessing the setup of an energy community, which involves answering questions related to the technical, economic, environmental, and social aspects of the community. Two assessments are carried out: a top-down assessment where a stakeholder decides to sell energy directly to the neighborhood instead of selling it to the market, and a bottom-up assessment where a group of people is interested inproducing their own energy. The assessments conclude that energy communities can play a vital role in achieving climate neutrality by 2050 and that new energy community-based business models can help to make energy communities even better.

The European Use Case is a study that aims to explore the impact of EU-wide policies on achieving the EU's goals on climate change mitigation and energy efficiency (Chapter 5). To achieve its goal, the WHY Toolkit is soft linked with the PRIMES modelling suite to provide a granular representation of load profiles of energy consumers and model the specificities of different building types. The PRIMES-BuiMo model simulates the future development of the buildings sector in the EU Member States and projects energy consumption, fuel mix, equipment choice, renovation rates, investment, and CO2 emissions under alternative policy scenarios. The model splits the stock of buildings in many categories, by geographic locations, age of construction, income classes and service sector sub-sectors. The soft-link of PRIMES-BuiMo with the WHY Toolkit will enable an improved assessment of households’ energy demand and a better representation of factors like income, preferences, weather, access to loans, location, and household composition. This Use Case provides an improved understanding of the role of energy consumers towards the systemic transformations required to reach the EU Green Deal goals by exploring the effects and feasibility of climate neutrality in the buildings sector with unprecedented temporal and spatial granularity, while capturing system interlinkages between energy demand, supply, prices, grids, fuel mix, and storage. Behavioral changes, such as transitions to sustainable lifestyles, can contribute significantly to achieving decarbonization and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, ESMs have limited sophistication and theoretical and/or empirical validation in representing lifestyle changes as these variables are mostly exogenous. As a result, they offer limited insights into consumer-side transitions and the associated implementation barriers for policy. This Chapter also presents a methodological framework to integrate consumer-led transitions into ESMs, focusing on the transport and residential sector. The methodology used in the EU Use Case involves integrating data from the WHY toolkit into PRIMES-BuiMo, creating an interface that matches the categories of buildings
in PRIMES-BuiMo to building categories that are simulated with the WHY Toolkit. PRIMES-BuiMo represents the market and non-market barriers as well as hidden costs and
perceptions that affect consumer behavior together with various policy instruments that influence the decisions of individual consumers. The non-market barriers can be broadly
split into two categories: a) (lack of) information and knowledge, and b) technical and regulatory uncertainty. The EU Use Case aims to understand the implications of enhanced
energy efficiency and electrification in EU buildings towards achieving climate neutrality by mid-century. It assesses the impact of policy interventions and incentives on energy
consumption and the uptake of low and zero-carbon solutions. The analysis provides key performance indicators related to emission trajectories, energy efficiency, uptake of
renewable energy, building renovation strategies, energy system costs, and affordability.

In Chapter 6, the Global Use Case investigates under which circumstances ambitious climate policies and energy efficiency targets affect the global energy mix and the future development of the buildings sector. Two integrated assessment models, TIAM-ECN and PROMETHEUS are used and linked with the WHY-Toolkit to improve their
simulation properties. This use case aims to bring the global dimension into the WHY project and contributes to the scientific literature on global energy scenario analysis. The scenario design as well as the selection of the input data and the output indicators are based on consultation with several stakeholders, the extensive literature research, and the internal expertise of the two modeling teams. Based on policy dimensions identified through the stakeholder input, internal and external variables are considered, and several scenarios are designed and implemented with the models. The validation of the global scenarios is also discussed in this chapter by presenting key results obtained from the PROMETHEUS and TIAM-ECN models. The projections obtained under the diagnostic scenarios are presented for the global energy system development and CO2 emissions. Furthermore, the trends observed in both models are compared, highlighting the differences in their projections. The validation process aims to demonstrate the advancements realized in the global energy system and Integrated Assessment models as part of the WHY project.