Societal value co-creation is an emerging practice in renewable energy projects. Despite its increasing popularity, however, unclarities persist regarding its operationalisation. This paper provides relevant insights by explaining how expectations of societal value co-creation evolved and became performed in a co-creative energy hub project in Emmen, the Netherlands. Over the course of project development, different and sometimes conflicting expectations co-existed of the hub's societal value potential. Drawing on observations, interviews, and document analysis, we describe the developers' efforts to synthesize these different value expectations into a coherent co-creation approach. The results indicate that timing in and of expectations, actor positions and organisational design are influential in how expectations become operationalised in renewable energy projects. Recommendations are provided for the design of societal value co-creation processes in future renewable energy projects.@en

In Energy Social Science (ESS), the concept of imagined publics is used to describe how energy actors perceive societal groups around new energy technologies and projects. Findings indicate that imagined publics often build upon deficit assumptions; people are (unjustly) considered unknowledgeable, incapable, unwilling and irresponsible agents in governance. While insightful, deficit-based explanations insufficiently capture the broad diversity of publics imagined around energy system change. In this paper, we share the results of a Q-study, designed to systematically identify diverse imagined publics in the Dutch heat transition. We found five imaginaries: 1. “Meaningful participation in a diverse society” 2. “Strong and enthusiastic communities in the lead” 3. “NIMBYs, social contestation and the threat to decarbonisation” 4. “Collectivism & vulnerable groups at risk” 5. “Unburdening individual user-consumers in the transition”. Each imaginary builds upon a different set of epistemic, action and normative assumptions, which construct public agency and responsibility in transitions in distinctive ways. We explore how these constructions come to justify roles and obligations for publics as well of other actors in the heat transition. One of our main contributions is that we explicitly move beyond the analysis of singular imaginaries as we consider imaginaries to be interactive, holistic, and contextual. In comparison, key social, ethical, and political tensions and trade-offs in the heat transition become visible.

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