On Nov 18, 2025, the PRISMA project hosted a webinar titled “Integrating societal aspects in electricity sector modeling”. Read below to discover more about it.
Key Takeaways
- Integrating societal factors have the potential to improve model performance. Public acceptance, investment risks and infrastructure lock-in contribute the most to model performance improvement.
- The potential future shift in societal factors has an essential impact on the projected emissions overall in 31 countries. Actors’ heterogeneity and public acceptance appear most often as the influential societal factors in terms of future emissions.
- In hindcasting exercise, gain in model performance depends strongly on the national energy context. This highlights the importance of customized strategies for future net-zero emissions target and climate policy development and governance.
Summary
To begin with, Evelina Trutnevte presented an overview of the reasons and strategies for collaboration between modellers and social sciences. Vivien Fisch-Romito then presented the study that included six societal factors related to infrastructure dynamics, actors and decision-making, and social and institutional context into an open-source simulation model of the national power system transition. The model was applied to 31 European countries and, using hindcasting (1990–2019), model accracy was quantified to analyse which societal factors improved the modelled pathways. Xin Wen finally demonstrated how this hindcasting could be used to inform forward-looking national electricity system transition modeling to 2050 to assess the socio-technical feasibility of pathways to achieve emission goals. This work paves the way to a more systematic and objective selection of societal factors to be included in energy transition modeling.
Q&A and Panel Discussion
1) How the societal factors were integrated in the model?
More details can be found in the publication as follows:
Fisch-Romito, V., Jaxa-Rozen, M., Wen, X. & Trutnevyte, E. Multi-country evidence on societal factors to include in energy transition modelling. Nature Energy 1–10 (2025) doi:10.1038/s41560-025-01719-7.
Trutnevyte E, Hirt LF, Bauer N, Cherp A, Hawkes A, Edelenbosch OY, et al. Societal Transformations in Models for Energy and Climate Policy: The Ambitious Next Step. One Earth 2019;1:423–33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2019.12.002.
2) Is there a geographical pattern in terms of the model performance?
The presenters highlight the differences between large and small countries and based on specific country’s electricity mix.
3) Would the same societal factors be important for non-European models?
The presenters highlighted the importance of data availability. The most influential societal factors to be included in Europe across the countries are public accpetance and economic incentive-based factors, but further analysis in countries outside Europe would be useful.
4) Can the findings from hindcasting be used for forward-looking studies?
The presenters mentioned limitation of hindcasting studies such as overfitting and thus suggested to use them with caution. Yet, hindcasting does provide empirical evidence on what are essential societal factors to be considered and how to evaluate different model versions, which help improve the model performance and reduced subjectivity.
Watch the recording: https://youtu.be/O61IKC7vOcY
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101081604 – PRISMA. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.