About the Why Project

Energy System Models (ESMs) are tools that help energy experts and policy makers to rationally describe energy systems and systematically evaluate the impacts of long-term energy scenarios. Current ESMs lack accuracy required for proper capture of the use of energy in households. WHY develops a new Causal Model combined with an innovative profiling approach to analyse human decision making in energy consumption and human reactions to energy policy changes.

WHY therefore creates innovative methodologies for short and long term load forecasting. The WHY toolkit will be used to assess several scenarios simulating different policy measures. All results will be open-sourced to maximize uptake, and be widely disseminated to diverse target audiences.

Stakeholder engagement constitutes an essential component of the WHY project. From the project’s beginning, external partners provided input to determine their requirements from the WHY modelling toolkit. Following the initial stakeholder mapping, the WHY project partners developed a stakeholder strategy that builds on co-creation, co-design and collaborative use case development. A series of co-creation workshops invite relevant stakeholders of the field to explore needs, pitfalls, and potential measures on various scales to be considered when developing the WHY project results. Open Days such as WHY Open Day at the EU Green Week provide insights on how the envisaged innovation can be implemented, while stakeholder engagement workshops, such as the online workshop “Improving Demand-side Modelling to Inform Ambitious Climate Policies in the European Union” aim at determining technical, behavioural and policy components, which should be included in the WHY Use Cases.

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