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This paper aims to: first, it studies expert opinions about the future of clean, decentralized energy technology in Australia; second, develop an interpretive and participatory foresighting methodology for a forthcoming study.

This paper reports a forecasting study about the future of clean energy. Driven mostly by economics and changing carbon policies, the energy sector is currently moving from fossil fuels to a variety of cleaner technologies. Energy experts have several incommensurate interpretations of how this change will happen. This paper describes the first phase of an ongoing study that foresight clean energy futures in Australia. By building on a participatory method in a scientific expert community, it describes the path from technological presumptions into four parallel yet interconnected scenarios. The paper also explores the social drivers behind these scenarios.

First, energy experts in Australia classify futures into four main scenarios: abundant, where energy will be mostly produced by solar cells; traded, where the future of energy lies in virtual power plants and microgrids; circular, which targets Australia’s NetZero goals through biomaterials, carbon capture and new powerful; secure, which secures the country’s energy supply through coal and nuclear energy. Second, they locate policy as the most important form of wildcards. The policy is multilayered from local to US politics and falls outside the scope of forecasting.

The most important limitations of the study are: first, its reliance on scientific and technological experts, which guarantees its scientific validity but may underrepresent the social drivers of energy; second, this study is a methodological pilot of a larger study that will target industrial, commercial and local drivers; third, its focus on Australia, where politics, the size of the country and climate shape the uptake of clean energy in specific ways, most notably in the case of rapid uptake of solar energy.

The main practical implications of the paper are its broad focus on clean energy futures and its participatory foresighting approach, which can be repeated in other studies.

The main social implication of the study is that it clearly shows that a technological perspective is necessary but not sufficient in understanding the future of clean energy. The paper also shows that local drivers importantly mold the future and should be taken into account in future studies and policy.

This paper makes two contributions. First, it organizes several technologies into four scenarios that clarify Australia’s clean energy futures better than a piecemeal study would do. Second, it developed and piloted an interpretive participatory methodology for studying futures by building on references from design research. This methodology will be used in subsequent studies.

The purpose of this paper is to create socio-technological future scenarios of Japan in the year 2050 and beyond, with a particular focus on energy and its relation to science and technology (S&T).

A workshop based on the scanning-based foresight method (SBFM) was conducted. Social change scenarios were created by participants browsed scanning materials about futuristic topics. Then, energy and society scenarios were produced by combining social change scenarios and future issues describing S&T related to energy in Japan in the future.

The participants who have different scientific and technological experties produced various images of Japan’s energy society around the year 2050. Based on these depictions, future visions of scenarios about energy and society were different in terms of consistency between S&T and future needs from current visions which focus on the transient of social awareness. The sociocentric view and confidence in self-made technology were found in the workshop and the participants believed some social problems would be solved with rich experiences and expertises in S&T even if human resources were limited. It was also found that each scenario portrayed an optimistic view of the relatively near future, in which innovative energy-related technologies are developed to optimize both personal satisfaction and social efficiency. On the other hand, we found rather pessimistic survival scenarios about the far future as concerns climate change and natural disasters.

Experts from several fields used their insight to apprehend an energy future and depicted, from scientific and technological perspectives, a vision of a different future society from the one that would emerge in a traditional linear scenario in which a proper balance is struck between the usage of S&T and its limitations. SBFM was also found to be beneficial for insight into energy S&T with its many uncertainties.

This paper aims to provide an important perspective to the predictive capacity of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) meeting dates and production announcements for energy futures (crude oil West Texas Intermediate (WTI), gasoline reformulated gasoline blendstock for oxygen blending (RBOB), Brent oil, London gas oil, natural gas and heating oil) market returns and volatilities.

To examine the impact of OPEC news on energy futures market returns and volatilities, the authors use a conditional quantile regression methodology during the period from April 01, 2013 to June 30, 2017.

From the empirical findings, the authors show a conditional dependence between energy futures returns and OPEC-based predictors; hence, the authors can find clear the significance of relationship in the process of financialization of the OPEC announcements and energy futures in the case of this paper. From the quantile-causality test, the authors find that the effect of OPEC news is important to energy futures. Specifically, OPEC announcements dates predict the quantiles of the conditional distribution of energy futures market returns.

The authors confirm the presence of unidirectional nexus between OPEC news and energy commodities futures in the long term.

This paper aims to examine dynamic equicorrelations (DECO) and directional volatility spillover effects among four energy futures markets, namely, West Texas Intermediate crude oil, heating oil, natural gas and reformulated blendstock for oxygenate blending gasoline, by using a multivariate fractionally integrated asymmetric power ARCH–DECO–generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) model and the spillover index technique.

The empirical analysis uses the dynamic equicorrelation model of Engle and Kelly (2012) to examine time-varying correlations at equilibrium. The authors further analyze dynamic volatility transmission among energy futures by using Diebold and Yilmaz (2012) dynamic spillover index based on generalized value-at-risk framework.

The empirical results provide evidence of heightened equicorrelations at times of financial turmoil. More specifically, the dynamic spillover analysis shows that volatility is transmitted predominantly from crude oil to the other markets and risk transfer among four markets exhibits asymmetries. Spillovers are found to be highly responsive to dramatic events such as the 9/11 terror attack, 2008–2009 global financial crisis and 2014–2016 oil glut.

The results of this study have important practical implications for investors, portfolio managers and energy policymakers as the presence of time-varying co-movements and spillovers suggests the need for dynamic trading strategies. There are also implications regarding risk management practices, as there is evidence of increased volatility transmission at times of financial turmoil and uncertainty. Finally, the results provide insights to policymakers in a better understanding of the spillover dynamics.

This paper investigates the DECOs and spillover effects among crude oil, natural gas, heating oil and gasoline futures markets. To the best of the knowledge, this is one of a few studies that examine co-movements and risk transfer in energy futures in a comprehensive framework.

The purpose of this study is to explore the principal research query and whether strategic foresight deployed by entrepreneurial firms in energy transition aims at crafting future readiness.

With a focus on entrepreneurial firms working in the alternative energy segment in the Indian context, the intent is to examine the deployment of strategic foresight by incumbent firms and their entrepreneurial journey. The authors have adopted the approach of Eisenhardt for this research. The area of interest for the authors entailing strategic foresight by entrepreneurial firms in energy transition aligns with defining features reflecting the aim of Eisenhardt method for this exploratory research coupled with constructivism.

While the future scenarios in the energy sector have to be necessarily multiple, their alignment with different geographic, economic, demographic and political outlooks shall be defined by the pathways niched through the deployment of strategic foresight for arriving at those scenarios.

Strategic foresight deployed by entrepreneurial firms has the potential to create future readiness through self-reliant sustainable economic value chains for local populace, thus propagating holistic development in remote regions.

This paper attempts to knit together the domains of strategic foresight, entrepreneurial firms and energy transition through case research and present the future thinking deployed for navigation in uncharted pathways by capturing the foresight component of these incumbent firms chosen through careful case selection. The narrative has been strengthened by the varied interviews across participants and the observations made by the authors during the research work.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate “best practice” building strategies and sustainability‐oriented techniques and tools used to assess the energy performance of housing developments. The objective is to propose guidelines that can integrate futures thinking into the selection of energy‐related design responses, such as materials, building components and energy systems, from the early project stages.

An interdisciplinary approach is adopted with the inclusion of social, economic and environmental aspects of the energy supply and demand. A multiple case study approach is employed, which focuses on the residential sector of European mixed‐use developments that represent sustainable communities of “best practice”.

The investigation of “best practice” housing developments reveals that the majority of design responses cover mainstream environmental design strategies. Energy efficiency measures are still the “low hanging fruit” towards meeting the sustainability objectives. In addition, established sustainability‐oriented techniques and tools used focus mostly on projections of almost certain facts rather than explorations of a portfolio of plausible futures.

The paper represents a shift away from the short‐term mindset that still dominates design and construction practices. It provides an overview of building strategies and decision‐support techniques and tools for improving and incentivising sustainable energy solutions over the long term.

This study seeks to propose the implementation strategies for energy sustainability on a Malaysian university campus.

The paper describes five proposed implementation strategies for Malaysian Universities to contribute to a sustainable energy future and to realise a sustainable university, namely: gaining top management commitment, raising energy awareness, providing energy education, developing energy conservation behaviour and developing a sustainable campus implementation blueprint.

Over the years, numerous global energy issues have been identified, which include fluctuation of world energy prices, uncertainty of future energy supplies and environmental degradation. All these problems are threatening global movement towards a sustainable energy future. Immediate action should be taken by everyone in order to secure a sustainable energy future for the next generation. Malaysian universities, which are composed of hundreds of building blocks equipped with massive facilities, present enormous opportunities to contribute to a sustainable energy future, through reduction of their overall energy consumption.

The proposed implementation strategies are set in the Malaysian context. These strategies detail the crucial aspect towards an energy efficient campus especially in Malaysian universities. It is recommended in future studies to benchmark other countries in this research.

The study provides an overview of the important strategies for energy sustainability on a Malaysian university campus.

Corporations need a structure for thinking through the development of a new energy/environment strategy and the business implications of different strategy alternatives. This paper aims to investigate how to develop a customized corporate energy strategy.

This four‐step process focuses on the major energy/environment issues requiring corporate decisions; it generates two alternate scenarios of the future that span the possibilities and identifies basic policy choices for corporations and also the tradeoffs to be made.

The paper finds that this process to develop a new energy strategy addresses the prospects that the way an organization manages its energy and environmental threats and opportunities over the next 15 years could invigorate or cripple it. The four major drivers of uncertainty for the future: the dynamics of energy supply and demand, global warming effects, society's environmental‐mitigation and remediation priorities, and world economic development outcomes.

Bill Ralston is the co‐author of the best‐practice guide The Scenario Planning Handbook (with Ian Wilson).

The four‐step process outlined here provides corporate executives the practical means to interpret the global forces buffeting them, to identify new pathways for creating value in the future and to get started.

This process to develop a new energy strategy evaluates the prospects that the way an organization manages its energy and environmental threats and opportunities over the next 15 years could invigorate or cripple it.

Energy systems are quickly in transition and their complexity has been dramatically increased. Although there are numerous studies and researches about future of energy in terms of technology or fuels, few studies have been done based on comprehensive socio-technical dimensions of energy systems’ futures. One key question to fill this gap is that how can we consider electricity as a sustainable common good/resource, beyond some conventional considerations related to public or private sector orientation? The purpose of this study is to find an acceptable answer for this question..

To achieve the purpose of this study, after reviewing some relevant studies, key effective factors on the future of energy have been recognized in an expert panel and structurally analyzed by Micmac software based on cross-impact analyze method. Thereafter, four scenarios for transforming the electricity distribution from a monopoly good to a common resource have been developed and described based on scenario workshops method..

Four scenarios for transforming the electricity distribution from a monopoly good to a common resource have been developed and described. These scenarios include “spider grid,” “local grid,” “intermediate grid” and “off-grid.” Furthermore, different dimensions of electricity as a common good/resource have been investigated. As a result, the authors find out that common resource is a creatable concept that can be referred to some goods depending on certain conditions.

Electricity, like any other resource with common characteristics, can be considered and treated as a common resource, depending on the way we generate, share and distribute it, ownership and property rights, management and decision-making mechanisms, social participation processes and governance criteria.