QTDIAN

What problem it solves

There is broad consensus that social and political factors are important drivers and constraints of the energy transition. However, models are generally focused mainly or entirely on techno-economic aspects and do not adequately represent these non-technical aspects. This calls for new approaches that support a better representation of the social and political aspects of the transition in energy modelling. For this reason, we have developed QTDIAN.

QTDIAN – Quantification of Technological DIffusion and sociAl constraiNts – is a toolbox of qualitative and quantitative descriptions of socio-technical and political aspects of the energy transition that influence the overall potential, the rate of energy-related technology and service diffusion and the design of the future energy system.

QTDIAN consists of two main elements:

1. Qualitative storylines that are different because they are based on governance logics of the energy transition and build on observed social and political drivers and barriers in the European energy transition. We adapt these empirically observed patterns to generate empirically-informed quantifications of the storylines.
2. Quantitative, empirical data for several important social/ political parameters that can be used together with the storylines or as separate building blocks to answer specific research questions with energy models.

Inputs

QTDIAN is based on the needs of both modellers and users of the models, which we identified in SENTINEL WP1 and WP7. The social storylines are based on transition theory and on empirical observations of actual drivers and barriers.

Outputs

• empirically founded social storylines
• datasets of social and political drivers and barriers of the transition, both in the form of raw data describing past and current developments and manipulated to constitute consistent, empirically-based quantifications of the storylines

The proposed quantifications are ready to be plugged into energy models.

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