Immersive Technologies to Support the Design and Policymaking for Complex Energy Systems Operating under Uncertainty

Energy infrastructure decisions are large, long-lived, and often irreversible. The futures they are made against are not: demand, renewable resource availability, technology costs, regulation, and policy all move in ways planners cannot forecast. Optimising against a single expected future, the conventional approach, can produce decisions that look defensible on paper and fail in practice.

Strategic Engineering offers an alternative, designing complex systems to preserve flexibility and keep options open rather than committing early to one path. A central premise of this research is that the analytical case for flexibility is not the binding constraint. Adoption is limited by cognitive, organisational, and institutional barriers, which suggests decision-makers may need to experience the consequences of uncertainty and flexibility rather than meet them only as abstract model outputs.

The project tests that idea through RECAP, the Renewable Energy Capacity Planning Simulator, a serious-game environment built for this research. RECAP compresses a long-term renewable capacity-planning problem into an interactive session in which participants make sequential investment decisions under uncertainty and learn to weigh robustness, staged investment, and flexibility. The research asks whether this experiential route improves decision quality relative to conventional analytical tools, whether any improvement persists over time, and whether it transfers to planning problems the participant has not seen before.

• Establish whether experiencing uncertainty through a serious game improves the quality of long-term capacity-planning decisions, compared with conventional analytical tools.
• Determine whether any improvement in decision quality persists over time, rather than fading once the session ends.
• Test whether what participants learn transfers to planning problems they have not previously encountered.
• Develop RECAP as a reusable experimental environment for studying how people make complex infrastructure decisions under deep uncertainty.

The work treats the serious game as an experimental instrument rather than a training aid, which sets the requirements for how it is built and how it is evaluated.

1. 01Serious game environment
2. 02Sequential decisions under uncertainty
3. 03Controlled comparison
4. 04Retention and transfer
5. 05Quantifying the value of flexibility

Serious game environment

RECAP compresses a multi-decade renewable capacity-planning problem into an interactive session, with staged investment decisions, uncertain demand and resource conditions, and consequences that play out where the participant can see them.

Sequential decisions under uncertainty

Participants commit capital in rounds without knowing how demand, resource availability, costs, or policy will resolve — so robustness, staging, and flexibility become choices they make rather than concepts they are taught.

Controlled comparison

Decision quality in the game is measured against conventional analytical tooling applied to the same planning problem, so the experiential route is evaluated rather than assumed.

Retention and transfer

Participants are re-tested after a delay and on unfamiliar planning problems, separating a short-lived session effect from durable, generalisable learning.

Quantifying the value of flexibility

A companion levelised-cost model estimates the savings Strategic Engineering can deliver in combined solar PV and battery storage projects, grounding the game's incentives in explicit financial terms.

The research is active. Both models below are running and open to play; experimental results will be published here as the study progresses.