Participatory development of community energy concepts with multi-criteria decision analysis, energy system optimisation and facilitated workshops to consider local preferences

INTRODUCTION: Decentralised renewable energy resources (RES) are often abundant in smaller, more rural municipalities. These communities often lack the capacity to develop extensive energy concepts and thus exploit these resources in a structured way. We therefore developed an integrated participatory approach to developing feasible energy concepts for small communities. The novelty lies in the combination of methods, the consideration of uncertainties, and the application to an exemplary municipality in south-west Germany. METHODS: We use multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) in facilitated stakeholder workshops to link energy system models (ESM) with local preferences. A high transferability is ensured by using mainly public data. We conducted workshops with the local council and other stakeholders in the municipality, initially focussing on their values and objectives. We then used an ESM to generate alternatives achieving these objectives before eliciting preferences to evaluate the alternatives in the MCDA. RESULTS: The workshop discussion revealed three values: economic sustainability, environmental sustainability, and local energy autonomy. A total of eight alternatives for the 2030 energy system are identified to achieve these values. We find that an alternative that seeks only maximisation of economic sustainability should be rejected based on elicited preferences. Instead, several alternatives seeking a maximisation of environmental sustainability with (weak) constraints on economic sustainability (i.e. total cost) and local energy autonomy consistently achieve the highest overall performance scores. A maximisation of economic sustainability or local energy autonomy alone results in the lowest overall performance scores and should therefore not be pursued by the community. The intermediate alternatives demonstrate that an equivalent performance gain with respect to autonomy comes at higher costs than the same gain with respect to environmental sustainability. Similarities between the best performing alternatives in terms of technologies that can be installed by 2030 show that our methodology can generate concrete and robust recommendations on building-level measures for energy system design. DISCUSSION: Our ESM takes a central planning approach on a community level. Ultimately, however, it is mostly the households and firms that need to invest into RES or efficiency technologies to realise the developed energy concepts. When comparing our results with microeconomic profitability considerations, our findings will be helpful for the (local) government to design policies and support schemes. The presentation will discuss the differences between microeconomic profitability and macroeconomic optimality. Moreover, the presentation will discuss carbon emission abatement costs at the local level (based on the considered alternatives) and compare these to costs at the global level and current carbon emission market prices