POWERUP · Promoting Opportunities for Wide-scale Energy Renewal: Unlocking Potential

The market uptake of RES depends on a complex combination of political, geographical, economic, social and cultural factors that are specifically intertwined in each locality. In addition, the acceptance and willingness of directly affected stakeholders to support the deployment of RES depends on the perceived fairness about how the decisions are made (procedural justice) and how the benefits are shared (distributive justice). POWERUP adopts a holistic approach towards the market uptake of RES for electricity and provides a set of open source tools and methodologies addressing all these factors, tailoring the RES projects to the local conditions and increaseing their acceptability and market uptake. The tools include a GIS-based decision support tool for initial feasibility assessment, a business model toolkit for reconciling stakeholder requirements and producing equitable business models, and a co-creation toolkit for engaging the stakeholders in co-design of a RES project that is reproducible and tailored to the local needs and conditions.The tools are supported by a social acceptability strategy for RES that provides guidance for considering all social aspects in the decision-making and design process.The POWERUP tools and methodologies will be extensively validated in 4 European regions and replicated in 10 follower regions, covering a variety of conditions all over Europe. The project aims to involve >700 public and private stakeholders and organise 46 workshops, incresing the perception of fairness of the RES business models by 80% and the community acceptance by at least 50%. The project consortium is a team from 5 EU countries that comprises regional energy agencies, public authorities, universities, and research centres and includes leading experts in Social Science and Humanities, Business, Renewable Energies, ICT and data science, legal and regulatory framework, with large practical experience in promotion of the renewable energies uptake.