The market uptake of RES depends on a complex combination of political, geographical, economic, social and cultural factors that are specifically intertwined in each locality. In addition, the acceptance and willingness of directly affected stakeholders to support the deployment of RES depends on the perceived fairness about how the decisions are made (procedural justice) and how the benefits are shared (distributive justice). POWERUP adopts a holistic approach towards the market uptake of RES for electricity and provides a set of open source tools and methodologies addressing all these factors, tailoring the RES projects to the local conditions and increaseing their acceptability and market uptake. The tools include a GIS-based decision support tool for initial feasibility assessment, a business model toolkit for reconciling stakeholder requirements and producing equitable business models, and a co-creation toolkit for engaging the stakeholders in co-design of a RES project that is reproducible and tailored to the local needs and conditions. The tools are supported by a social acceptability strategy for RES that provides guidance for considering all social aspects in the decision-making and design process. The POWERUP tools and methodologies will be extensively validated in 4 European regions and replicated in 10 follower regions, covering a variety of conditions all over Europe. The project aims to involve >700 public and private stakeholders and organise 46 workshops, incresing the perception of fairness of the RES business models by 80% and the community acceptance by at least 50%. The project consortium is a team from 5 EU countries that comprises regional energy agencies, public authorities, universities, and research centres and includes leading experts in Social Science and Humanities, Business, Renewable Energies, ICT and data science, legal and regulatory framework, with large practical experience in promotion of the renewable energies uptake.

The green energy transition is being promoted around the world as key to tackle climate change. However, as it is increasingly fostered and associated measures implemented, such as the deployment of renewable energy infrastructures (REI), contestation also has risen. Social sciences’ research has attempted to analyze and understand this relevant social issue in the last decades and proposed several and distinct conceptual frameworks for that. The NIMBY (Not in my backyard) framework has been one of the most widespread and well-known frameworks for explaining opposition specifically to REI but is being increasingly questioned by more recent frameworks that emphasize instead the roles of issues of (in)justice in REI related decision-making processes and policies and their impact on negative responses to these infrastructures. However, the proliferation of conceptual frameworks on energy justice and related issues regarding REI has been immense in recent years and it is difficult to, from a practical and empirical perspective, understand how exactly their relevant insights and contributions can be applied to particular REI projects and decision-making. This project aims to contribute to that by conducting a systematic academic and grey literature review of the most recent literature on community responses to renewable energy and associated infrastructures. For this, solar energy and associated infrastructures will be particularly focused, as an expanding and crucial technology within the renewable energy transition, namely in countries like Portugal and Switzerland. Based on this literature review we will then propose an integrated framework to be discussed and validated with key experts and stakeholders in the area. Based on these two previous tasks, the end goal of this project is to deliver a handbook with guidelines for policymakers, energy companies and local communities, on best practices for the successful deployment of REI, particularly solar.