WHY Final Webinar: Presentation of Results

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.

Energy is consumed in the household to use appliances/machines that provide a service to us, such as heating, lighting, cooling and more.  In many cases, this is a conscious and voluntary action. The main objective of the WHY project has been to understand what, when, how much and why energy is consumed at households.

Energy System Models are tools that help energy analysts, planners and policy makers to rationally describe energy systems and systematically evaluate the impacts of long-term scenarios, such as transitioning from fossil-fuel based energy consumption to renewable energy consumption. This transition includes considerations from local energy production and consumption to European and global energy production and distribution. The WHY project developed innovative methodologies and a toolkit for short and long-term household energy consumption modelling. Use cases benchmark these models ranging from local to European-wide and global energy grids. The WHY Toolkit builds on the causality chain to model the energy demand, building on associations between measurable variables that describe human choices.

We are now ready to share with you our findings, which are aimed at various stakeholders - such as municipalities and cities as well as EU policy makers - and give you insight into the most important aspects for a successful transition to a more sustainable energy system.

To support this, we developed policy recommendations based on our findings for EU and national energy policy makers:

• 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.

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 prices of the energy in each period of the tariff have to be large enough to provide a clear incentive to change behaviour.
• 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.

We will discuss the policy recommendations in detail and explain the reasoning and data behind them with the researchers who worked on the WHY toolkit. More information can be found in the agenda below!

The Recording of the Final Webinar will be available soon.