Growing community energy initiatives from the bottom up: Simulating the role of behavioural attitudes and leadership in the Netherlands

摘要: Local energy initiatives (LEIs) are communities of households who self-organize to meet their demand with locally produced green energy. They facilitate citizen participation by developing context-specific solutions, which calls for leadership and complex social dynamics. We present an agent-based simulation model explore the formation community from bottom-up, accounting networks evolution opinions facilitating or hindering LEIs. Our novel relies on well-established theories uses empirical data systems in Netherlands individual citizens’ preferences. Specifically, our computational captures behavioural drivers value orientations, relates individuals traits aggregated stylized facts about at level. The results indicate that when lack participants cooperative orientation, altruistic citizens prosocial orientations become essential creation LEIs, revealing different pathways achieve public good benefits. analysis systematically demonstrate leaders can be a bottleneck LEIs’ increase initiators is conducive Therefore, policies aiming increasing number should target small groups potential, could lead projects, synergies wider