What if we designed decarbonised energy supply based on public preferences?

People’s opinion about decarbonised electricity supply is a crucial factor for the energy transition and the speed at which it is unfolding. It can both accelerate the deployment of necessary infrastructure through citizen action or slow it down through opposition. While public preferences about single aspects of electricity supply, like prices and technology, have been assessed before, these preferences cannot be directly translated to preferred energy supply on the system level. This is for two reasons: First, the most preferred solutions may not be technically feasible. It is not possible to assess feasibility of decisions on the subnational level in isolation, as the European electricity system is highly interconnected and decisions in one region will impact other regions. Second, people have diverging preferences leading to diverging energy supply systems. Here, we are ranking decarbonised energy supply scenarios for Europe based on public preferences. We ensure technical feasibility by building on results of techno-economic energy system models on the subnational scale. To rank these scenarios based on public preferences, we apply results of national choice experiments in four European countries. Building on random utility theory, we derive utilities from these choice experiments that allow us to rank energy supply scenarios. We address heterogeneity of preferences by applying different principles of distributional justice. We compare rankings based on public preferences to rankings based on other criteria, most importantly cost. Our approach allows to evaluate energy plans not only by technical and economic aspects, but also by the opinion of the people.