Successful first workshop on Energiewende participation tool
June 15th 2018 – How can all parties involved in the German Energy Transition be allowed to participate in planning processes? This question is being researched by the Reiner Lemoine Institute together with the Energieavantgarde Anhalt e. V. as part of the Kopernikus project ENavi. On May 23rd and 24th , the first workshops on a so-called Stakeholder Empowerment (StEmp) tool, which will assume this function, were held in Wittenberg in the premises of the Leucorea Foundation. In four sessions, 25 participants from the Anhalt-Bitterfeld-Wittenberg region discussed the content and implementation of the tool. They represented the various stakeholders in the energy transition, such as the (energy) economy, science, administration, agriculture, and civil associations and assessed assumptions and measures from their respective perspectives on the Energy Transition in the region.
The tool is a dialogue and visualization tool with which measures and their effects in the context of the Energy Transition can be presented on a regional level. It is being developed step by step, together with actors from the region, in order to grasp possible development paths from many perspectives and thus to create a holistic picture. On the one hand, this should help the planning authorities to take into account the needs and criticisms of locals, and on the other hand, the approach should open up new ways to a renewable energy supply in the sectors of electricity, heat, and mobility. Dialogues between all participants can thus be conducted on a neutral, transparent basis. The illustration shows the development process of the tool. Steps I and II have already been implemented, with the workshop being step III in which the requirements and stakeholder input is documented. In the next step, the implementation will take place and towards the end of the year 2018, the actors will be able to test the beta version of the tool in another workshop.
The energy system of the Anhalt-Bitterfeld-Wittenberg region is modeled for the tool. The model maps the status quo of the electricity and heat supply and develops various future scenarios. In addition to time-resolved energy balances, the space required for wind turbines and photovoltaics is also compared to the availability of space. Thus, the question should be answered what a regional renewable energy supply – a regional “energy balance circle” – could look like. It can be shown which measures are necessary to achieve the national climate protection goals and which (area) impacts they would have in the region. This makes the tool an Energy Transistion navigation system on a small scale.
The tool has an interactive and user-friendly interface, which on the one hand shows results of precalculated scenarios and on the other hand allows users to create their own scenarios by parameter variation. The first drafts of the tool were presented in the workshops (Figures 1 to 4).
The web-based tool can be used, for example, in the discourse on the regional Energy Transition, public participation in planning approval procedures and wind farm approval procedures. Since it is being developed as open-source software, the application of the tool as well as the use of the source code for further development is possible for all.
There was a lot of positive feedback in the workshops. Through the valuable input of the participants with different backgrounds, further contents could be identified. For example, parameters such as the expansion of wind turbines could also be scaled up and not only varied as before for the entire region. The desire for higher spatial resolution ran through all the workshops. To find the right balance between the level of detail, a view of the overall system, feasibility and usability we take as a challenge from the workshops.
