Helmholtz Alliance ENERGY-TRANS overview

The Helmholtz Alliance ENERGY-TRANS was a large third-party funded project of ITAS. All ITAS research areas were involved and linked in the Alliance with sub-projects. ENERGY-TRANS research focused on the energy transition and related requirements for the transformation of the energy system. Core assumption of ENERGY-TRANS was that this transformation does not only include technical, but also different societal challenges.

Important issues are, for example, changes in user and consumer behavior, acceptance problems and conflicts relating to new infrastructures such as high-voltage lines, suitable political and economic conditions for initiating and promoting the necessary innovations, adequate operator models for decentralized energy systems, and also handling complex, uncertain and ambiguous risks associated with new energy systems. To meet these challenges, the Helmholtz Alliance has launched a research program that investigated the systemic interactions between technology, organization, and behavior in Germany. The emphasis was on the demand side of energy systems and focused on user needs, integrated scenario building, innovation diffusion, infrastructure planning, and risk governance.

More than 80 social and political scientists, psychologists and philosophers, economists, legal scholars, engineers and systems analysts from nine institutions collaborated in five research fields, 17 projects, two horizontal tasks and two integrative key topics. The KIT coordinated the Alliance which ran from September 2011 until December 2016.

Besides the University of Stuttgart, ITAS provided the largest research contingent and participated in ENERGY-TRANS with about 20 scientists. Corresponding to the complex tasks of ENERGY-TRANS, the Alliance integrated ITAS expertise from all research areas. The highly interdisciplinary research also addressed important issues of the Helmholtz program “Technology, Innovation and Society” (TIS).

Regional modeling

The project starts from model-based trend analyses of the electricity, heat, and mobility systems for determined regions. The selection of regions has taken into consideration that great regional differences exist, e.g., between urban and rural areas with respect to a) prospective changes in electricity supply, heat supply, and mobility supply and to b) the long-term targets of the energy concept of the German government requiring an expansion of renewable energies to which different regions may contribute in very different ways. These differences are also related to population, economic structure, the established structure of the energy supply systems, as well as to mobility patterns and use.

To specify future socio-economic framework conditions for the energy demand on a regional level, a regional input-output model (from Forschungszentrum Jülich) is used in combination with information on demographic change. Based on the integration of different models, the project performs its economic, technological, and environmental analysis. In this context the mobility system is modeled by the Institute of Transport Research of DLR.

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