Using experts interviews to create electricity scenarios and to assess social impacts

Abstract

This paper focus on the assessment of the social dimension of electricity planning, resourcing to participative methodologies. A guide for interviewing power systems experts, covering a wide range of themes is presented. The guide focus on evolution of electricity consumption and supply according to each type of technology, driving forces among emerging technologies, energy policy, the relevance of sustainable development among institutions and markets and, finally, a first impression on the relevance of social impacts for candidate technologies. The main aim of the methodology is to gather discourses among experts and try to understand the connection between narratives and their consequences on the best scenarios under the social point of view. Therefore, the interview uses both uantitative and qualitative questions. The former are used for creating electricity generation scenarios within a 10 year range, while the latter aim at gathering each position’s underlying explanations, which will be useful for cluster analysis in future work. The results presented in this paper refer to interviews which took place among the members of the working group of the project “Sustainable Electricity Power Planning”.