Designing energy futures: a participatory foresight study in Australia

Purpose This paper aims to: first, it studies expert opinions about the future of clean, decentralized energy technology in Australia; second, develop an interpretive and participatory foresighting methodology for a forthcoming study. Design/methodology/approach This paper reports a forecasting study about the future of clean energy. Driven mostly by economics and changing carbon policies, the energy sector is currently moving from fossil fuels to a variety of cleaner technologies. Energy experts have several incommensurate interpretations of how this change will happen. This paper describes the first phase of an ongoing study that foresight clean energy futures in Australia. By building on a participatory method in a scientific expert community, it describes the path from technological presumptions into four parallel yet interconnected scenarios. The paper also explores the social drivers behind these scenarios. Findings First, energy experts in Australia classify futures into four main scenarios: abundant, where energy will be mostly produced by solar cells; traded, where the future of energy lies in virtual power plants and microgrids; circular, which targets Australia’s NetZero goals through biomaterials, carbon capture and new powerful; secure, which secures the country’s energy supply through coal and nuclear energy. Second, they locate policy as the most important form of wildcards. The policy is multilayered from local to US politics and falls outside the scope of forecasting. Research limitations/implications The most important limitations of the study are: first, its reliance on scientific and technological experts, which guarantees its scientific validity but may underrepresent the social drivers of energy; second, this study is a methodological pilot of a larger study that will target industrial, commercial and local drivers; third, its focus on Australia, where politics, the size of the country and climate shape the uptake of clean energy in specific ways, most notably in the case of rapid uptake of solar energy. Practical implications The main practical implications of the paper are its broad focus on clean energy futures and its participatory foresighting approach, which can be repeated in other studies. Social implications The main social implication of the study is that it clearly shows that a technological perspective is necessary but not sufficient in understanding the future of clean energy. The paper also shows that local drivers importantly mold the future and should be taken into account in future studies and policy. Originality/value This paper makes two contributions. First, it organizes several technologies into four scenarios that clarify Australia’s clean energy futures better than a piecemeal study would do. Second, it developed and piloted an interpretive participatory methodology for studying futures by building on references from design research. This methodology will be used in subsequent studies.