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GLIMPSE: Supporting long-term air quality and energy planning
Citation:
Loughlin, D., C. Nolte, C. Lenox, Tai-Shaing Wu, A. Kreider, Y. Ou, S. Babaee, AND S. Smith. GLIMPSE: Supporting long-term air quality and energy planning. Region 3 Air Director Meeting, Ocean City, MD, September 18, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
Air quality management, greenhouse gas mitigation, and the energy system planning are linked, with decisions in any one area affecting the other two. The GLIMPSE project involves the development of a decision-support tool that helps state planners understand these inter-relationships, identify and avoid unintended consequences, and take advantage of synergies in decision making. GLIMPSE and the lessons learned in its application thus are expected to be of use for state and regional planners. Air quality planners could use GLIMPSE to understand challenges resulting from population and economic growth, technology change, climate change, and behavioral choices. Energy planners could use GLIMPSE to explore the environmental consequences of their decisions and use that information in making choices with better environmental outcomes.
Description:
Nearly 40% of the U.S. population live in areas that exceed or nearly exceed the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS). Air quality planners need tools to understand factors that will affect near- and long-term compliance, including population growth and migration, economic growth and transformation, new and emerging technologies, climate change, land use patterns, and human behavior and choice. They also would benefit from a “computational laboratory” that allows potential policies to be tested in a virtual environment. The GCAM Long-term Interactive Multi-Pollutant Scenario Evaluator (GLIMPSE) is being developed to meet these analytical needs. Target users of GLIMPSE include analytical staff at EPA, regions, and states, as well as university researchers. In this poster, we describe GLIMPSE and its computational engine, the Global Change Assessment Model. We also present an application in which the emissions and electricity production implications of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative are examined.