The use of energy modelling results for policymaking in the EU. Deliverable 1.1. Sustainable Energy Transitions Laboratory (SENTINEL) project

Achieving the EU’s commitment under the Paris Agreement, the Energy Union Strategy, and the European Green Deal, requires a significant transformation of current energy systems. Renewable energy is a major component of this transition, and thus, policymakers face the challenge of making decisions about new renewables-dominated energy systems. Because real world experimentation is in large scale not possible, models can serve as ‘laboratories’ by allowing policymakers to explore different decarbonisation options in a virtual world and generate a better understanding of the policy domain.

While many energy policies are backed by computational models, we do not know exactly how and when policymakers use models, and to what extend policymakers influence modelling performed. We take these gaps as a starting point to empirically investigate the twofold processual interaction between computational energy modelling and energy policymaking.