Exploring Actor Heterogeneity in Energy Transitions Through Behavioral, Social, and Computational Lenses

The energy transition is reshaping energy systems, moving them from centralized and largely passive infrastructures toward more decentralized, digitalized, and participatory systems. Alongside technological developments, new actors, including prosumers, energy communities, aggregators, and active consumers are playing an increasingly prominent role in energy production, consumption, and system management. This evolution is giving rise to a more complex and heterogeneous energy landscape, where differences in behavior, preferences, capabilities, and socio-economic conditions significantly shape the effectiveness of energy policies and market interventions. At the same time, advances in behavioral science, data analytics, artificial intelligence, and energy system modelling are creating unprecedent opportunities to better understand and represent these dynamics.As energy systems grow more decentralized and consumer-centric, research must move beyond simplified representations of energy users and stakeholders. Actor heterogeneity is widely acknowledged, yet it remains poorly understood and inadequately represented across analytical frameworks, policy evaluations, and modeling approaches. This gap limits our capacity to anticipate behavioral responses, assess policy effectiveness, and design efficient and equitable interventions. This Research Topic aims to advance knowledge on how actor diversity shapes energy transitions, and how such diversity can be better characterized, measured, and embedded in research, policy, and practice. We welcome contributions that develop innovative concepts, methods, datasets, and modelling approaches to more faithfully represent the complexity of energy actors, their behaviors, and their interactions.This Research Topic welcomes interdisciplinary contributions that examine how actor diversity influences energy transitions across different contexts and scales. Topics of interest include consumer and prosumer behavior, energy communities, energy citizenship, technology adoption, demand-side flexibility, energy sufficiency, social acceptance, energy justice, digitalization, artificial intelligence, computational social science, agent-based modelling of socio-technical systems, and the integration of behavioral insights into energy system models. Submissions addressing governance, market design, participation mechanisms, and policy innovation are equally encouraged. We welcome original research articles, reviews, methodological and modelling studies, data-driven analyses, case studies, perspective pieces, and policy analyses. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches are relevant, especially those that bridge disciplinary boundaries and shed new light on the social, behavioral, technological, and institutional dimensions of the energy transition. Topic editors: Guillermo Borragán, Jorge Andres Moncada Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/82597/exploring-actor-heterogeneity-in-energy-transitions-through-behavioral-social-and-computational-lenses