Digital citizen engagement and personalised behavioural interventions are combined to encourage and enable clean energy investments.
Striving for climate-neutrality by 2050 requires all major economies, including the Netherlands, to make energy use in homes more sustainable and end the dependence on natural gas. To achieve this, it is critical that households rapidly increase the rate at which they implement low-carbon and energy-efficiency measures, such as energy efficient renovations or switching to low-carbon heating systems. To date, adoption rates of these measures and technologies remain low and the energy transition in the built environment does not take up the required speed to reach the 2050 climate neutrality goal.
Our interdisciplinary ALIGN4energy consortium helps to accelerate this energy transition in the Dutch residential sector by aligning citizens, policymakers, and energy system developers with tailored low-carbon energy investments with the help of innovative AI-powered algorithms. This project uses a bottom-up, data-driven strategy to align and integrate research on human systems (individual and group decisions, social dynamics) with modelling of energy systems. This allows for the simultaneous optimization of investments in clean energy at the individual, collective, and energy system level. The resulting digital decision-support system, the SAMEN platform, will provide tailored information to its users. This will allow subsequent policy measures to be aligned with citizens’ preferences and societal needs.
This research is coordinated by the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and conducted in a consortium with TU Delft, TU Eindhoven, CWI, Erasmus University Rotterdam, TNO, Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS) and Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving.
The ALIGN4energy project (with project number NWA.1389.20.251) of the research programme NWA ORC 2020 is partly financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
Project Leader: Dr Sanchayan Banerjee
Project members: Dr Julia Blash (co-lead); Marjan Nikoloski, Louison Thépaut, MSc, Kevin Goes, Prof. Wouter Botzen; Prof. Pieter van Beukering, Dr Miguel Poblete Cazenave and Dr Madeline Werthschulte.
For more information: www.align4energy.nl | align4energy@gmail.com |
Project Publications:
Akbari, S., Han, Q. & de Vries, B. (2023). Developing an Uncertainty-Inclusive Decision Framework for Homeowners Energy-Efficient Investment Decisions. In Lopes, M., Matschoss, K. & Bouman, T. (eds), Conference Proceedings BEHAVE 2023 the 7th European Conference on Behaviour Change for Energy Efficiency (pp. 183–194). Rijksdienst voor Ondernemend Nederland (RVO).
Krutisch, L.N., Qian, Q.K., Mlecnik, E. & Visscher, H.J. (2023). Exploring pro-environmental behaviour spilling effects in Dutch homeowner energy efficient renovations. In Lopes, M., Matschoss, K. & Bouman, T. (eds), Conference Proceedings BEHAVE 2023 the 7th European Conference on Behaviour Change for Energy Efficiency (pp. 529–540). Rijksdienst voor Ondernemend Nederland (RVO).