A rapid expansion of clean energy infrastructures — from renewables and grids to emerging solutions like hydrogen, carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) and advanced nuclear — is critical for a clean, secure and competitive Europe. This was a key message from this year’s European Sustainable Energy Week (EUSEW). Yet speed must not override meaningful public engagement, because the trust, awareness, and participation that emerge from such engagement play a decisive role in whether infrastructure projects succeed or stall.
On 17 June 2026, as part of EUSEW, the Users TCP Public Engagement for Energy Infrastructure Task and the Institute for European Energy and Climate Policy (IEECP) hosted a webinar asking: do people actually want to engage with energy infrastructure — and if so, how? Which engagement approaches are effective? And what can we learn from established or emerging energy infrastructures?
The session, moderated by Diana Süsser (Senior Expert, IEECP), opened with new findings from a multi-country survey, presented by Nives Della Valle (Senior Expert, IEECP), before handing the floor to four experts working on public engagement on different corners of the energy system:
- Andrzej Ceglarz, Director Energy Systems, Renewables Grid Initiative (RGI), Germany — Expert on electricity grids and the EU’s Pact for Engagement
- Merryn Thomas, Researcher, University of Exeter, UK — Expert on public engagement, currently working on underground thermal energy storage (the PUSH-It project)
- Tanja Perko, Senior Researcher, SCK CEN, Belgium — Expert on public engagement for advanced nuclear (small modular nuclear reactors)
- Jazaer Dawody, Senior Adviser, Swedish Energy Agency — Expert on hydrogen infrastructure
The event also marked the official launch of the Engage4Energy Community of Practice, a new space for ongoing exchange on public engagement for energy infrastructure across Europe.
Five key takeaways emerged from the event
1. People don’t need to be experts to want a say
Nives Della Valle (IEECP) presented the results from a survey — over 2,400 respondents across the Netherlands, the UK, Sweden, and Austria — which looked at three technologies: renewable hydrogen, CCUS, and advanced nuclear.
Unsurprisingly, self-reported knowledge varied. Renewable hydrogen showed little variation across countries, while advanced nuclear and CCUS produced more divergence — the Netherlands stood out on nuclear knowledge, and CCUS was the technology people felt least informed about overall.
But low expertise didn’t translate into disinterest. As Nives put it, even though respondents weren’t experts, “they are open to engage with the projects about the development of these technologies close to their home.” The UK was the most consistently open to engagement across all three technologies; Austria was the most reluctant, particularly on advanced nuclear and CCUS. Overall, the findings showed that people want to engage in dialogues even if they have a low expertise.
2. It’s important to understand why — and how — people want to be engaged
The survey split engagement preferences into three modes: consultees (informed and consulted), co-creators (active partners in decision-making), and the disengaged (prefer no involvement). Across all four countries and all three technologies, the consultation mode was the clear majority preference — the comfortable middle ground between opting out entirely and co-designing decisions. Co-creation came second, and the disengaged group was consistently the smallest — except for advanced nuclear, where disengagement peaked, especially in Austria.
Merryn Thomas (University of Exeter) added a practical resource to this picture: a freely available 80-page Engagement Catalogue, co-created within the EU-funded PUSH-It project on underground thermal energy storage. It covers engagement principles, formats (from town hall meetings to school visits), and around 30 ready-to-use activities — from quick icebreakers to in-depth participatory mapping.
But before reaching for any specific format, Merryn stressed that the choice of method should start one step earlier: understanding why people want to be engaged in the first place. Do they want decision-making power, or simply to be kept informed? For her, that underlying purpose — together with the stage of the project — is what should determine which activity or format actually fits the context, rather than picking from the catalogue at random. She also emphasised the importance of sufficient time and resources to enable meaningful engagement.
3. Legitimacy isn’t about getting a “yes” — it’s about being heard
Tanja Perko (SCK CEN) framed engagement around small modular reactors through three types of legitimacy:
- Input legitimacy — who gets to participate, and is engagement happening before decisions are already made?
- Process legitimacy — is the dialogue fair, accessible, and does it let people actually learn from one another?
- Output legitimacy — is it transparent how input shaped (or didn’t shape) the final decision?
She made it clear why this matters most:
“What matters the most is not whether everyone agrees with the final decision, but whether they perceive the decision-making process as fair, transparent and meaningful.”
She also pointed to the social-learning dimension of engagement — both a cognitive component (learning the facts, the trade-offs, others’ interests) and a moral component (developing the capacity to handle disagreement constructively, rather than chasing forced consensus). Her closing call: put social scientists — psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists — inside the deployment teams, not on the sidelines.
4. The public is an enabler, not an obstacle for project success
Jazaer Dawody (Swedish Energy Agency) brought the conversation to hydrogen, where Sweden’s industrial decarbonisation push — steel, heavy transport, and increasingly shipping — depends on land-use decisions, permitting, grid connections, and community buy-in happening in parallel.
Her core message: in projects she’s observed, when people feel excluded, projects slow down; when people feel engaged, they accelerate. She also flagged that with hydrogen specifically, the biggest barrier is often not technical safety but risk perception. Therefore, communication has to keep explaining how safety is managed, not just assert that it is. Her closing call was for clearer national guidance and standards for engagement, which she felt Sweden — and Europe more broadly — still lacks.
5. Established infrastructure offers hard-won lessons for emerging tech
Andrzej Ceglarz (RGI) brought in the perspective of electricity grids — not an emerging technology, but one with years of engagement experience to draw on, much of it through the EU’s Pact for Engagement, launched in November 2023 as part of the EU Grids Action Plan.
The Pact brought together the European Commission, energy regulators, grid operators, NGOs, and researchers to build ten guiding principles for early public engagement, followed by a roadmap — launched the previous month — for embedding dedicated stakeholder-engagement chapters into grid investment plans.
His central lesson for newer technologies: engagement isn’t just about siting decisions. It spans the entire infrastructure lifecycle — planning, implementation, maintenance, operation, and decommissioning — and people need to stay engaged at every stage, not just the controversial first one.
Asked for his one-word (he used two) takeaway at the close of the session:
“Vision and trust — to make sure that the vision that is there is trusted, and then that will allow people to get engaged.”
The closing round, in one word
Asked what’s most needed to enable meaningful public engagement going forward, the panel’s answers formed a fitting summary of the hour: listening to people’s needs, vision and trust, time and resources, clear national guidance, and social science expertise.
As Diana Süsser noted in closing, that’s also the spirit behind the new Engage4Energy Community of Practice: a space to keep listening, exchanging, and — as several speakers put it — co-creating the standards and tools that meaningful public engagement for energy infrastructure will need across Europe.
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