Human-in-the-loop MGA to generate energy system design options matching stakeholder needs

Abstract: The common use of cost minimisation to support energy system design decisions hides from view many economically comparable design options that stakeholders may prefer. Modelling to generate alternatives (MGA) is increasingly popular as a way to go beyond least-cost designs, providing stakeholders with diverse portfolios to appraise. However, generating all the feasible designs is not computationally viable; modellers must choose what design features to generate diversity around, despite not knowing which trade-offs matter the most in practice. Therefore, MGA alone cannot ensure the generation of design options that match stakeholder needs. To address this shortcoming, we propose a human-in-the-loop (HITL) approach that automatically integrates stakeholder preferences into MGA. We elicit preferences by letting stakeholders interact with a tentative MGA design space. Hence, we decode those preferences to feed them back to the MGA algorithm and perform a guided search. This search produces a human-trained design space with more designs that mirror the elicited preferences. A synthetic experiment for the Portuguese energy system shows that HITL-MGA may facilitate consensus formation, promising to accelerate technically and socially feasible energy transition decisions.