An empirical investigation of citizens' preferences among four energy scenarios

Abstract

Within the context of the Jülich Compatibility Study on Energy Supply Systems the model of the planning cell was used to incorporate participation into the process of policy formulation and evaluation and to gain information about intuitive preferences concerning the four basic energy scenarios constructed by the Enquete Commission of the German Federal Parliament. Planning Cells consist of groups of citizens who are selected by random process and are given paid leave from their workday obligations for a limited period of time to work out solutions for social problems. A total of 24 planning cells were organized throughout Germany to evaluate the four energy scenarios and to formulate recommendations for the policy maker. As a result most citizens favored the more moderate scenarios [1, 5], but were almost equally divided in their preference distribution with respect to the pronuclear (option 2) and non-nuclear scenario (option 3). Using a simplified MAU-model to determine the preferences of each citizen, the surprising result was achieved that more than 40% of the participants reached the highest positive score for the most antinuclear, soft energy scenario. This result could be partly explained by cognitive factors and by preference group influence.