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Quantifying and Disaggregating Consumer Purchasing Behavior for Energy Systems Modeling
Citation:
Johnsons, E., A. Yates, R. Andrews, S. Arunachalam, C. Lenox, AND T. Felgenhauer. Quantifying and Disaggregating Consumer Purchasing Behavior for Energy Systems Modeling. CMAS Conference, Chapel Hill, NC, October 27 - 29, 2014.
Impact/Purpose:
This poster is being displayed at the 13th annual CMAS conference. The purpose of these conferences is to allow the CMAQ model user and development communities to share their experiences with air quality models, modeling, and model development and to help connect the members of the atmospheric modeling and model research communities.
Description:
Consumer behaviors such as energy conservation, adoption of more efficient technologies, and fuel switching represent significant potential for greenhouse gas mitigation. Current efforts to model future energy outcomes have tended to use simplified economic assumptions to represent complex behavioral choices, based on a lack of available data. Simulation of various mitigation scenarios could be improved by better capturing the behavioral and attitudinal influences on energy-related economic activity. Further, a better sense of how mitigation outcomes vary with consumer behavior will afford policymakers a clearer understanding of how to target use reduction initiatives strategically. To address these issues, we estimate a set of discrete choice models designed to capture variation in the degree to which consumers hesitate to adopt new energy-saving appliances and vehicles. The results from this work will feed into the EPAUS9r, a regional database representation of the U.S. Energy Use designed for us with the MARKet ALlocation (MARKAL) Energy System model for further use in developing current and future energy scenarios in the U.S.