ENavi Kopernikus project

Project team
Pablo Thier, Stefan Gößling-Reisemann (†)

Project duration
10/2016 - 09/2019

Project Partner

• Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) (project coordination)
• more than 80 partners from science, research, business and civil society

Funding
Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)

Description
With the "Energiewende" (energy system trasformation) Germany has set itself the aim of transforming the current energy system into a broadly CO₂-free system based on renewable energies. An economical, environmentally sound, reliable and socially acceptable energy system requires a holistic approach at the system level. ENavi therefore sees the Energiewende as a society-wide transformation process and links scientific analyses with politico-social requirements.

The ENavi project aims to:

• gain a deeper understanding of the complex networked energy system both in the energy sector and associated sectors such as industry and consumption,
• demonstrate options for systemically integrating the components of future energy system taking into account energy policy objectives and legal and other framework conditions and constraints,
• assess as accurately as possible what impacts a given measure would have on the energy system in the short, medium and long term, and finally
• generate options for effective measures through transdisciplinary discourse.

One of the key products of the project is a navigation tool with which the researchers can assess in advance the effects and side-effects of economic or political measures. This should help answer the decisive questions: How can we ensure that the Energiewende is not too much of a burden for low-income groups in Germany? What measures can effectively and efficiently promote electro-mobility in Germany? Or: How can several thousand suppliers putting solar electricity on private roofs be sensibly coordinated?

The contribution of the Resiliente Energiesysteme department is the development of an assessment methodology to evaluate measures and interventions (so-called policy packages) in relation to the resilience criterion. We help to ensure that the measures can be designed in such a way that the systems maintain their performance even under stress and turbulent conditions. We use evolutionarily proven principles, concepts and elements to design complex systems.