Exploring the Change in Importance of Values in Sustainable Energy Systems

Driven by incessant increase in Greenhouse Gas emissions (GHG) and its subsequent impact on global temperatures, now more than ever many countries are taking part in investing and increasing the deployment of various state-of-the-art Sustainable Energy Systems (SES). Planners and policy makers often take the acceptance of these technologies by society for granted. Among the different identified strategies, values inherent to society often play a significant role in the design of SES, its social acceptance and successful deployment, and hence the inclusion of these into energy systems remain urgent. However, there exists a complexity of change in values of people, alternatively called as value change. Much of this is due to growth of highly unpredictable emergent energy systems around us and lack of anticipation of how values change due to these systems. Current approaches that support embedding values in technology, lack in considering value change. This research studies the underlying mechanisms that drive change in importance of values in energy systems by formulating an Agent-Based Model. In doing so, it anticipates and analyzes the effect of various policies and uncertainties on change in importance of values. It is found that, a scenario consisting of combination of policies and uncertainties proves to be a best case where all considered values are satisfied or their importance is lowered.