 As Dirk introduced, I am a researcher at Delft University of Technology here in the Netherlands. And in my research, I'm studying, surprisingly, public values in the context of smart grids. So I was super excited when Richard invited me to share some of my research findings during this webinar today. And as Dirk mentioned in my presentation, I will focus on a value that is of special importance for me and of special importance in the energy transition, I believe, that is justice or fairness. And the question, how can we integrate fairness into smart grids? To do so, I will share some practical experiences from some smart grid projects that I've studied here in the Netherlands. They are depicted on this slide. There are some local smart grid pilot projects, I would say. And I do think that the mindset shift that Fabian mentioned earlier, going from a planning mindset to an experimentation mindset is actually fairly strong here in the Netherlands. And that's why I thought also I will pick a few of these projects to talk about some really practical experiences. I will share later what these projects are in details for now. Just keep in mind, these are all local neighborhoods. So you can imagine approximately between 20 and 50 households. And they are a collaboration, typically, of the households themselves. Then you have energy suppliers, you have distribution system operators, you have an energy cooperative. In this case here, you have aggregators, software providers, hardware providers, consultants, universities. So really a large number of parties who are involved. And from a technical perspective, they all look more or less like this. So you have the community here and on the household level, households usually have solar panels. They have a battery to store excess electricity that is generated during the day. Some of the projects you have variable tariffs or variable prices to incentivize that the energy that is generated in the neighborhood or by the house is also used there. They all use smart metering, of course, and they also all have a control and monitoring system to optimize the smart grid, as well as a web portal or an app that households could use to get insights into electricity flows, for example, between the solar panels and the battery and the solar panels and the house. Now, let's go back to this question of values. What are values and what are values that are relevant for smart grids? So I think something that was highlighted by Fabian really nicely is that sustainability is the core value of what we strive for with smart grids. We design smart grids in order to integrate more renewable energy in our electricity grids. And also in most of these projects, the four projects that I mentioned, the aim is mostly to maximize the use of solar energy in the local neighborhood. But there are other values as well, values that need to be safeguarded. And I think energy justice is one of them and maybe one of the most important ones. We want more sustainable systems, but we want to do and we want to do this in a fair way, in an inclusive way, in a way that fosters citizen participation and empowerment. And I think energy justice is also one of the values that has really become more and more salient and important in the political and public debates in the recent years. What is energy justice, though, is often not all so clear. So if we look at the academic literature, energy justice is defined as the equitable access to energy, the fair distribution of costs and benefits, and the right to participate in choosing whether and how energy systems will change. So it is actually a concept that has three dimension. It's a very broad understanding that goes way beyond a conception of fairness that says, let's compensate losers of the transitions just by paying them some money. And these three dimensions of energy justice are visualized here as well. We're talking about energy justice as a distribution, and that's in essence what we want to reach. We want to reach a fair distribution of benefits and harms. In the context of smart grids, that is, of course, there is profit cost distribution, but beyond that there are broader benefits and harms that have to be distributed. Fabian also mentioned to what extent the systems rely on the sharing and collection and use of detailed household energy data. So we might even consider data as something that we used to pay for these services. And when we talk about these local projects, they are often funded by public sources and the extent to which knowledge is shared for learning, in order to learn for the future, it could also be considered as a benefit. The perspective of procedural justice talks about how decisions are made and by whom, and it's especially about how households participate in decision making in the energy transition and also in smart grid projects. Another aspect is the extent to which households can control processes that happen in the smart grid versus the extent to how much is automated when we talk about algorithms, for example. And finally, there is a dimension of justice as recognition, which asks the question how inclusive the system is to diverse groups in society. And one of the most important points here is, for example, how accessible are smart grids to homeowners, but also to tenants, to low income households. And I've highlighted a few of these aspects of values here, and I would like to use the experience from the pilot projects that I mentioned earlier to say a bit more about these four aspects, or you could also say call them four values. I'll start at the right side with something that I think is one of the most important values for smart grids, which is the accessibility to diverse group of people in society, the accessibility for all. And if we look at accessibility, the question is how do we make smart grids inclusive? How do we make them accessible for all? They need investment and they need space, especially for solar panels and for batteries. Of course, you need a roof that is suitable, you need space in your house to put the battery. And that makes smart grids on average more accessible for higher income groups and house owners. Especially in dense urban areas, the question is even more important, how to make it accessible for tenants, for lower income groups and for households who simply don't have the space or the physical characteristics in their house to install solar panels or a battery. And I think the examples from these projects are interesting because on the one hand you had two projects which are both, one is here in the east of the Netherlands, one is more in the south. And they are both these local neighborhoods with home owners, okay, but interestingly, not all of them had solar panels and batteries. And even the houses who didn't have solar panels and who didn't have a battery could participate in the smart grid. And they did this by saying, okay, we are a physical community, we are a neighborhood. And we give financial incentives to the households to use energy when the sun is shining. And also the batteries, of course, were optimized and automatically steered to store as much solar energy as possible. Another example is the project up here, the community battery in Reisenhout, which is actually a social housing neighborhood. And that is quite rare that smart grid projects are done with a with a social housing neighborhood in this particular neighborhood. All of the houses had solar panels and the local municipal energy supplier developed rental mechanism together with the housing corporation and to provide the social housing community with solar panels. In addition, they used a community battery, just a shared battery that was standing in a shipping container actually on the corner of the street. And they had the advantage that no space was needed in the houses to in the homes to install a home battery. And in total, there was also less cost involved than if all households had to have a separate home battery. So these are all good examples how to how to make smart grids more accessible. I think that should be taken into account in future projects. Let me go to the to the next value and from this perspective of as justice as recognition to the justice as a distribution and how to design for privacy, or I would rephrase maybe how to design for fair collection and use of household data. And in in all projects here, the experience that I made was that detailed smart metering data was used for system optimization. And so for example, in the virtual power plant in Amsterdam, you had 50 about 50 home batteries, they were aggregated into a virtual power plant into a common capacity and this capacity was then used by an energy supplier and an aggregator to treat on the wholesale market. And to do so they needed the detailed battery charge status the detailed solar generation data detailed energy use data to optimize the system. And what I found actually across all four projects. And what was surprising for me is that in all project is this detailed data collection was seen as acceptable and okay from the perspective of the households. Despite being very privacy sensitive information and despite the household saying oh yes privacy is very important for us. And I think I found two conditions under which the data sharing and data use was acceptable that was a of course, if it was GDPR conform and be it was provided that this is taking place in the scope of this research projects or these energy projects. And here I really noticed that the smart grids by the households were not seen as data driven projects. They were seen as energy projects. And they had a high level of trust in the public organizations in the universities who were involved. There was a close collaboration and contact between the households and project partners. But when you dug a bit deeper. It was actually clear that most of the households didn't fully understand how their data was being used at all. So I would, I would still recommend to be aware that once smart grids might be seen as more data driven in nature. And once they are offered at a larger scale as a market service outside of the small scope of a project or a neighborhood where everybody knows each other, the privacy might be much more relevant again. And I think this would indicate this indicates also here that actually services that are offered by a cooperative to its members might be actually more trusted. In general, designed for privacy, always what I would say is strive for informed consent and real informed consent, not the seeming informed consent that we have when we click I agree in a smartphone app. And focus thereby on comprehension that users really need to understand how their personal data is used. Otherwise, since this is so trust dependent also, there is a certain risk that if users lose trust, they start to move out of the system such as the experienced I think in one of the projects where certain participants just unplug the battery because they didn't trust what the battery was doing anymore. They didn't, they didn't have full transparency and insight and understanding was what's happened, what was happening with their information. And let me go to the, to the next value that I highlighted earlier from the perspective of procedural justice how to arrange household participation in decision making processes. Actually, I think these are the experiences from these two projects are interesting again because both of them had a quite participatory approach. They had household representatives that were involved in the decision making prior to project consortium. What worked well here additionally is there was there was really clear communication channels between the one person who was the household representative and the remaining groups of the households. That didn't work here so well. And on the other hand, this project also experienced something that is very common for smart grids technical problems appear. The technological complexity of smart grids is still relatively high these are still relatively new technologies. And it is mostly research projects so technical challenges are bound to happen at some point along the line. And it is often challenging for these projects that this means a drop in household engagement because it means often less communication with the households. So I would what I would always recommend is have to have a dedicated approach to household engagement, of course, to also have one project partner who is responsible for setting this up. And also not to shield households from technical issues households can often understand more than the project developers might think. And yes, there is some effort needed to translate complex technical problems into relatively easy language. But it's always better to communicate than to remain silent and thus cause a drop really in community engagement. And finally, I wanted to highlight the fourth value that I talked about earlier, which is this control versus automation of a system. The question here is really what should users be able to control through the rap and what is automated. And I'm talking here for example about batteries and the shifting of the use of household appliances. And I also think here that the experience of the virtual power plant in Amsterdam was quite interesting. I said earlier already that they had a bunch of home batteries that were aggregated and the aggregated capacity was used to trade on the wholesale market. This was all fully automated. You needed this for system optimization. The batteries were fully externally steered and controlled by an aggregator. That had the advantage that it was very easy to use for the households. They didn't have to do a lot about it. But on the other side, they had no control whatsoever, and they had no insight into what the battery was doing, which was considered as quite problematic for them because they could see the battery. It was a physical presence in their home. The batteries were heating up, the batteries were blinking, and they didn't know why. So you could see a bit of a trade-off here actually between the level of control that you can give a household and the extent to which system is easy to use. And one way to solve this tension is to design for meaningful control. Users should be able to control automation parameters. For example, if we're talking about this virtual power plant here, users should be able, for example, to decide how much battery capacity do I want to keep for myself and use it for my self-consumption. How much do I give for the virtual power plant and for steering by an external partner? And on top of that, you need transparency. Automation is acceptable, but it is acceptable only if users have insight into system steering and can understand what the automation is doing. And that means you need to visualize electricity flows from solar panels to the batteries to the appliances. You need to visualize in addition what consequences that has for electricity costs. And if that is the case, it should also give recommendations what can be done to save energy or to shift energy to times where renewable energy is abundant. For example, I think the traffic light example that Fabian mentioned earlier, having a traffic light in the living room, a similar system was used in one of the other projects to visualize expensive, medium expensive and cheap times to use electricity in the app that the users were using. And this is just a very transparent yet simple way to kind of give a recommendation what to do, but also visualize consequences of the smart grid for electricity costs. So I've talked a bit in fairly detail about the four values that I've highlighted here. There are more aspects of justice that I think need to be designed for. If you're interested in these, you can also reach out to me and to wrap this up at the end, going back to this perspective of how to integrate public values in smart grids. I would like to say or I would say that the energy transition and development of smart grids, it is value driven. We want more sustainable energy systems. So sustainability is really the core value that we strive for. Albeit it is often reduced to a technocratic understanding of we have to reduce local greenhouse gas emissions. So we need another perspective as well to integrate public values or social values. We want sustainability without harming privacy. We want to do the energy transition in an inclusive way. We want to have control over algorithms. And I do think that this concept of energy justice is a good lens to talk about more specifically what public values need to be safeguarded. Because from this distributive perspective, it allows talking about what matters, what benefits and harms need to be distributed beyond monetary profits and costs. It also asks for how decisions are made and demands that or kind of puts attention to to the to that fear procedures demand participation and transparency and principles of democracy. And it asks who is affected and therefore also draws our attention to the energy transition being a collective endeavor. So in the end, I think if we want smart grids, but also if we want the energy transition in general to be successful, we need to discuss how to shape and develop it in such a way that we reach sustainability goals. But at the same time, we take cost, we take justice into account with that. Thank you very much.