How to find energy plans that stakeholders actually want

A German university campus faced the problem of choosing a decarbonization strategy with 11 competing stakeholders. Rather than optimize for a single "best" answer, researchers coupled stakeholder preferences directly into the algorithm itself, generating 691 alternative plans that reflected what different groups actually cared about. By evaluating this diverse set through stakeholder preferences, they identified acceptable ranges for key options (solar capacity, storage, backup power) that single-optimal solutions would have missed.