Characterising successful SIE to enable secure, sustainable, competitive, and affordable energy transitions

Within the SONNET project, the main aim of WP6 is to quantify which initiatives engaged in social innovation in the energy sector (SIE-initiatives) achieve the highest contribution towards EU-aims. For this purpose, we prepared 3 different surveys that are included in Annex 3ff to assess different aspects and perspectives regarding the contribution of SIE-initiatives. Based on the responses to the first survey - responses from 42 researchers, 18 representatives of initiatives engaged in social innovation in the energy sector (SIE-representatives) and 36 representatives of organisations that are active in the energy sector (field-actors) - we find that SIE-initiatives most successfully contribute to their own aims, such as "social acceptance" and "local community". Aims shared by SIE and EU (referred to as shared-aims) towards which the SIE-initiatives are perceived to contribute the most are “renewables production” and lower “CO2-emissions”, which are also the Shared-aims that are most important to SIE-initiatives.