Citizens and energy transition: SEEDS comes to an end
The objective of the SEEDS project is to incorporate the city debate into decisions on the energy transition.
Four universities from 4 EU countries have participated from March 2021 to February 2024 in the SEEDS project. This has allowed to integrate humans into the design of energy transition scenarios and to model economic, technical and environmental limits. The central objective of the project has been the production and use of an interactive web application to collect the opinion of Portuguese citizens on possible futures of the energy system. This application includes a diversity of viable energy transition scenarios generated by the integration of an alternative energy generation model based on technical and economic parameters (Calliope) and an environmental impact calculation analysis (ENBIOS). This website has served to allow Portuguese citizens to declare priorities in relation to more than 250 scenarios with different territorial and technological distributions.
EU policy recognizes the urgency of reducing energy-related greenhouse gas emissions. However, the transition to renewable energies implies impacts in other dimensions that have not been sufficiently considered for the energy models. The LIVENlab group, part of Sostenipra, has participated in the integrated environmental assessment of these scenarios in order to be able to show the life cycle impacts of the scenarios in different dimensions. This project has also allowed to include technical improvements in the ENBIOS tool.
The SEEDS project has been supported by CHIST-ERA (CHIST-ERA-19-CES-004), the Swiss National Science Foundation (195537), the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) (CHIST-ERA/0005/2019), the Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigación (PCI2020-120710-2), and the Estonian Research Council (4-8/20/26).
Find out more about SEEDS at seeds-project.org