Sustainable Energy as a Complex Societal Problem using the Compram Methodology

Energy is a basic need for humanity. The more a country is developed, the more it is dependent on energy sources. After the industrial revolution in 1850 in Europe simple one-to-one energy sources like human power, animal, wood, water and wind power, changed into the use of one-tomany energy sources coming from fossil sources such as oil, gas and coal. This resulted in an accelerated development of the income of the people in these countries. Next to positive aspects of the development of energy there are negative aspects of non-renewable fossil sources causing pollution. Nuclear power energy appear to be a safety threat because of radioactivity. Therefore one searches for new or renewable energy sources such as water-, wind-, bioand sun energy. These sources seem to produce in a safer and less polluting way energy. Many countries depend on other countries for their need of energy. This creates vulnerable political situations, such as the dependency of European countries on gas from Russia and the dependency of the USA on oil of Arabian countries. The latter dependency was the main cause of the two Iraq wars in the last decennia (New York Times, period 2003-2008). Much of the energy people use comes from private energy companies. However, for these companies the cost-effect of new technological developments as wind, water and sun energy or biogases must be profitable. Non-renewable fossil sources, pollution, safety threats, political vulnerability, dependency of commercial privatized industries make the energy field complicated and complex. The many phenomena and actors in this field are in a complicated way related to each other by non-linear feedback loops. The consequence is that the system becomes a complex system. Easy sustainable solutions are hard to find and even more difficult to implement. The energy issue is a complex societal problem. In order to find new sustainable energy the problem has be to approached as a complex societal problem and handled along the lines of the field of methodology of societal complexity. Therefore the Compram methodology can be used. In the first step of the methodology experts of different fields with knowledge of different aspects of the energy problem are invited to discuss the problem. These can be experts with technological,