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Stakeholder-based Profiles to Understand Energy Use Behaviours

by Thomas Nacht, 4ward Energy Research

The WHY project is all about improving the knowledge on residential electricity consumption by considering the individuals' behaviours. For that purpose the WHY-Toolkit will be developed, which will be able to interact with existing energy system models or independent of them. While the general idea and functionalities of the WHY-Toolkit are well defined, we had to ask ourselves what requirements the potential users of the Toolkit or the results of the Toolkit will have. A tool well adapted to the requirements of the users is a tool which will be used.

So one of the first tasks in the WHY-project set the focus on the analysis of the stakeholder’s requirements. Following a co-creative approach, the WHY-consortium got in contact with a multitude of different stakeholders. A total of 63 contacts from over 13 EU member countries were asked to participate in the stakeholder involvement actions. For the stakeholder interaction we defined three methods suited to the background of these stakeholder:

  • Focus Groups
  • Surveys
  • Interviews

The stakeholder participation process took 6 weeks, in that time a total number of 27 stakeholders from 11 different EU-member states participated in the stakeholder involvement actions. Of these 27 stakeholders 19 stakeholders were male (70%) and 8 stakeholders were female (30%). Only 3 stakeholders participated in the focus groups, 5 in the survey and a total of 19 in the interviews. This turned out to be positive after all, since the results of the interviews were the most usable, given the circumstance that additional information could be obtained from the discussions with the interview partners. As a conclusion we will in future stakeholder engagement set a stronger focus on bilateral interviews.

To create a better understanding of the different stakeholders, 5 different personas following the Persona Method (Pérez-Montoro and Codina, 2017) were created:

  • Elena: A modeller that designs and develops energy system models and supports decision making by public authorities and private businesses.
  • Max: An industry expert who works for a company in the energy industry (DSO, TSO, energy supplier, etc.).
  • Polad: A policy advisor who provides energy policy advice and could be an employee of a consulting agency or work directly as part of a team for policy makers. 
  • Markel: An official representative or policy maker who could be working for the European Commission and is responsible for drafting and negotiating new legislations or regulations.
  • Alex and Andrea: A working couple who while tackling everyday life also feel the need to provide a sustainable future for their kids.

For the identification of the requirements, we applied the Volere[1] method, which lead to a definition of 22 functional and 7 non-functional requirements. Considering that we also have defined requirements during the proposal phase of the WHY-project, we got a total of 37 functional and 20 non-functional requirements, which will help us to shape our project results. We want to thank all the stakeholders who participated in our project, we are looking forward to staying in contact with you and keeping you involved in the project.

 Did we get you interested in the requirements for our WHY-Toolkit or in the stakeholder process in general? Good news, the WHY Deliverable 1.1 will be available soon on our Website. 

 [1]: Volere Requirements Specification Template – Volere Requirements