Page - 144 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

energy production, derived from EXIOBASE (a global, detailed Multi-regional Environmentally Extended Supply and Use / Input Output database) and external data sources on wind and solar energy capital and variable costs. The share of fossil fuels in the sector Electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning supply is gradually diminished and replaced by inputs necessary to construct, operate and maintain wind and solar PV energy based electricity generation. The rest is kept constant over the modelled period. The aim of our approach is to see how this change in inputs from other sectors to the sector of electricity generation will affect the rest of the economy in terms of monetary flows, and what the associated impacts would be in terms of employment requirements and GHG emissions. The demand for electricity is kept constant, but can be increased as a part of an economic growth scenario. The methodology enables comparison between different types of policies and infrastructures (e.g. countries with a different energy mix of fossil fuels based electricity generation). The approach can be used at every respective level of analysis – from regions and countries to larger socioeconomic and geographic units such as the EU. A potential extension could also include material requirements for the construction of renewables or the analysis of land requirements. Methodological challenges We propose the research approach described above as an alternative to conventional methods of estimating technological change in economic models dealing with renewable of post-carbon transformation in general, and for input-output modelling in particular. In this section, we compare the proposed method (input-output participatory modelling) with learning curves, a widely used approach in the field. We propose a process determining the technical coefficients that should help to overcome a significant number of methodological challenges, often described as limitations to the other methods. Learning curves, a popular approach in energy-climate input-output models, internalizing technological progress to replace the conventional assumption of an autonomous energy efficiency improvement, receives plenty of criticism. According to (Pan and Köhler 2007), “the learning curve cannot separate the effects of price and technological change, cannot reflect continuous and qualitative change of both conventional and emerging energy technologies, cannot help to determine the time paths of technological investment, and misses the central role of research and development activity in driving technological change”. While participatory modelling per se cannot separate between price and technological changes, the continuous versus qualitative changes, time paths of technological investments as well as the level of expected research and development activity in the field should be possible to address with the proposed research design. It enables to build several scenarios according to clusters of experts’ estimations, reflecting both continuous and gradual changes in the RES deployment and/or their production (technical) coefficients. The proposed approach should also ask for expected relations between institutional (political, economic) settings and research and development activity in the field. 144