On the 11th of June, WHY held the Open Day of the project in the EU Green Week 2021. The event has been an opportunity to engage with all stakeholders and interested citizens on how we can work together to make the ambition for a zero pollution and toxic-free environment a reality.

In the event different stakeholders and policy makers discussed about Energy System Models that allow testing and selecting better strategies for fighting pollution caused by the energy sector.

The event programme was structured in three main blocks, and it was moderated by Chris Merveille from GoiEner. In the Opening session, Rosa Santibañez Gruber, Vice-rector for Research and Transfer at the University of Deusto, gave the institutional welcome. It was followed by the speech from Maciej Grzeszczyk from the European Commission-DG ENER, on the Importance of Energy System Models for Energy Policy Making. Afterwards, Nives della Valle (European Commission, Joint Research Centre – JRC), keynote speaker of the event, presented “The Importance of Including Behaviors’ Aspects in Climate Policy”. Lastly, Cruz E. Borges, from the University of Deusto, and coordinator of WHY project, gave a short overview of WHY project.

Next, an Open discussion on “What can Energy System Models do to help in reducing the pollution? 5 Use Cases from WHY project” followed with the participation of different project partners: Thomas Nacht (4ward Energy Research), Leire Astigarraga (GoiEner), Cruz E. Borges, Panagiotis Fragkos (E-3 Modelling), Francesco Dalla Longa (TNO). The partners presented the approach of the 5 use cases in WHY: the Gniebing Use Case, the Goiener Use Case, Energy Community Use Case, European Use Case, and the Global Use Case. These use cases not only have quite different geographic scope (ranging from regional perspective to worldwide) but also cover a wide range of topics of interest for different stakeholders.

Lastly, the Panel Discussion focused on WHY Toolkit, with the participation of Thomas Nacht, Carlos Quesada and Cruz E. Borges. Thomas Nacht presented the concept of WHY Toolkit, the process for defining the requirements and parameters of the tools with the feedback of the stakeholders, the toolkit architecture. Carlos Quesada, on the other hand, presented the methodology and results obtained for analysing users behavior on electricity consumption at household level. For this, different datasets of energy consumption of different European countries have been processed and creating a narrative description of the personas behind each behaviour profile.

Finally, Cruz E. Borges presented his view on “Why do people invest time and money in the energy transition?”. He explained that WHY project has worked on studying the decision-making process for energy consumption, and trying to rationalize this process by building up a causal model. He explained the methodology for building it up, covering the speculative scenarios considered, the determinants, etc. Lastly, Cruz invited the audience to actively participate in the experiment, by completing this form.

The presentations and videos of the event are available in this link.