Description du projet :
Among the big challenges that new EU members have to face, cleaning the burden of environmental charges goes together with the organisation of the energy and production system in order to prevent new disasters, as well as creating a decision framework compatible with OCDE countries that will allow the local decision makers to create coherent and sustainable policies in order to achieve environmentally sound, yet economically viable development.
There are many environmental models and decision support systems available. However in a situation when many options and directions are possible, to compare these choices, perhaps the best type of tools can be a long-term optimisation model. One such model, MARKAL, is available to scientists and decision makers since seventies and has evolved into an integrated tool that allows the analyst to prepare and document various determinist or stochastic scenarios of investment paths in the energy sector, avoiding costly mistakes and lock-in effects for decades to come.
In this research proposal, we bring a project to create a MARKAL/TIMES-Romania country model with all standard features, plus a recent add-on in form of Social MARKAL extensions to assess behavioural parameters of the energy consumption, that allows the decision makers to design sustainable policies thanks to a system of taxes and subsidies, compute the exact amount of these financial instruments, but also to design sustainable information campaigns in favour of technologies to trigger desired changes in consumer's behaviour.
Standard MARKAL/TIMES model is expected to give a basic framework that will bring the debate to the same energy optimising platform with ETSAP participating countries such as Belgium, Canada, Danemark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, USA. It is a feature-rich and self-contained tool to identify and compare possible evolution paths to achieve a sustainable energy system in the long term.
Social MARKAL extensions give the modeler the possibility to address consumer behaviour on the demand side that does not correspond to the hypothesis of perfect information and perfect economic rationality. Consumers act in a suboptimal way either because they are not in possession of the information that would allow them to make better decisions, or they do not optimise their own utility based on the least-cost criterion, or even because they use an appliance or a technology in a different way from that it was designed for, for example using a bus for living, using a kitchen stove as an additional heating body, or a TV receiver as simulator of presence for lonely persons.
The deliverables will consist of an extensive database of all technologies used and that could come onto local market within next decades, together with all their technical and economical attributes and possible residual installed capacities for technologies already installed at the beginning of the modeling period. Also, scenarios for possible energy carrier prices, evolution of useful demand in sectors such as heating, lighting, transportation and end-products for industry and scenarios for emission limits. With that data, it will be possible to face different possible evolutions of the economy both as determinist and stochastic scenarios and foresee the need for hedging by postponing investment decisions until the incertitude has been dissipated. Finally, inclusion of social and behavioural parameters will allow the decision maker to design information policy to maximise the impact of political decisions on the demand side. This tool will be helpful to make robust and sustainable decisions about the energetic orientation of the country on a long-term horizont.
Research team within HES-SO:
Moresino Francesco
Partenaires académiques: Ion Smeureanu, Bucharest University of Economics
Durée du projet:
01.10.2012 - 01.03.2015
Montant global du projet: 322'578 CHF
Statut: Completed
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