joint-project: EmPowerPlan - regional planning of the energy transition - participation and justice on site and the big picture in mind; single-project: Power - big pictures and participation

The overall “EmPowerPlan” project is about testing and adapting tools and collaborative processes to accelerate the expansion of the energy infrastructure. To this end, it is necessary to support regional planning – in a manner as participatory as possible - so that areas are released for the expansion of renewable energies. This is made possible in particular through the use and socio-scientific embedding of the interactive "StEmp tool" developed by Reiner Lemoine Institute (RLI). The entire research process and especially the cooperation with practice actors will be accompanied and evaluated, using various - also empirical - social science methods. Hereby, the impact and thus the success of the cooperation can be evaluated and possible recommendations for improvement and transferability to other regions can be given. Regional expansion targets are often set top-down and adopted in energy market modelling. The latter are then the starting point for higher-level political decision-making processes: they are, for example, a key driver for future grid expansion, which is legally anchored by the German Grid Development Plan (NEP) process. The aim is therefore to introduce classic RE regionalisation for the region into the local discussion in order to measure the regional expansion targets against them.

One objective of the "Power" sub-project is to develop regionalised electricity market scenarios for Germany, taking into account economic efficiency, climate target achievement and equity (top-down scenarios), and to feed them back to a scenario of a sample region created in a participatory process (bottom-up scenario). Further objectives are the analysis of societal requirements for implementation and the participatory process of identifying and defining areas for renewable energy production facilities.