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Energy Systems Modeling and Analysis
Citation:
Kaplan, O. AND M. Isik. Energy Systems Modeling and Analysis. Stakeholder Mtg, Trenton, NJ, October 15, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
Energy systems modeling helps researchers identify strategies where multipollutant, multi-media impacts and the unintended consequences can be evaluated and compared. This knowledge can guide federal, state, and city governments, as well as corporations and other entities, in making robust and efficient technology pathways and argue the economic implications of adopting new technologies over adapting to environmental problems later. The objective of the energy systems modeling work at U.S. EPA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD) is to provide the Agency and other stakeholders with expertise, analyses, and tools to examine scenarios that describe the evolution towards more sustainable energy systems. The cornerstone of this effort is the U.S. EPA database (EPAUS9r), a regional database representing the U.S. energy system for use with the MARKAL (MARKet ALlocation) and TIMES energy-environmental-economic bottom-up optimization frameworks. The EPAUS9r is utilized both in-house and by a wide variety of external users to gather forward-looking insights into environmental and energy interactions. In recent years, U.S. EPA’s ORD has also started to develop two state- and local-level tools to aid local decision making. The first, GCAM-USA, is an Integrated Assessment Model (IAM) that characterizes the interactions among human and earth systems. IAMs typically have been applied to investigate future energy, land use, and emission pathways at global to continental scales. GCAM-USA is a version of the Global Change Assessment Model with U.S. state-level resolution. It incorporates U.S.-specific emission factors, pollutant controls, and air quality and energy regulations. GCAM-USA could help decision makers more fully understand tradeoffs and synergies among policy goals, identify important cross-sector interactions, and, via scenarios, consider uncertainties in factors such as population and economic growth, technology development, human behavior, and climate change. We are using GCAM-USA to explore how those factors affect NAAQS attainment, and asses the performance of management strategies. The second, NYC MARKAL, is the community-scale database that explores water and energy consumption and management scenarios under different policy options in New York City. The database is designed to help decision makers specifically in cities and states to establish resilience to extreme weather events, improve built environment and infrastructure, to manage limited natural resources, meet environmental goals such as Air Quality attainment goals and sustain economic growth. The database is implemented on the MARKAL framework. The focus has been on the buildings, transportation and electric (NYISO) and water utilities, and the existing stock of infrastructure (e.g., individual electric generating units, distributed energy resources), energy consumptions and emissions are calibrated to existing inventories. The tool can facilitate scenarios analysis where marginal abatement curves, future trends in technology and emissions growth can be analyzed. The future research directions include to make a customizable database available for use by other state and local communities that could input their unique data and use the scenario building features to evaluate environmental policies.
Description:
The purpose of this presentation is to update stakeholders in NY/NJ area on EPA/ORD's energy systems modeling capabilities. A briefing is planned for NJ DEP on October 15th 2018.