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Plausible energy scenarios for use in robust decision making: Evolution of the US energy system and related emissions under varying social and technological development paradigms
Citation:
Brown, K., T. Hottle, R. Bandyopadhyay, S. Babaee, R. Dodder, O. Kaplan, C. Lenox, AND Dan Loughlin. Plausible energy scenarios for use in robust decision making: Evolution of the US energy system and related emissions under varying social and technological development paradigms. CMAS, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, October 22 - 24, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
This research describes a methodology for analyzing various future energy system pathways to evaluate possible emissions changes and investigate the impact of new technologies or policies. This work would be most useful to other energy system modelers who could use these as baselines for future analyses. The results might also be useful to planners interested in different future outcomes.
Description:
The energy system is the primary source of most air pollution emissions. Thus, evolution of the energy system into the future will affect society’s ability to maintain air quality. Anticipating this evolution is difficult because of inherent uncertainty in predicting future energy demand, fuel use and technology adoption. We apply Scenario Planning to address this uncertainty and developing four very different visions of the future. Stakeholder engagement suggested technological progress and social attitudes toward the environment are critical and uncertain factors for determining future emissions. Combining transformative and static assumptions about these factors yields a matrix of four scenarios that encompass a wide range of outcomes. We implement these scenarios in the U.S. EPA MARKAL model. Results suggest that both shifting attitudes and technology transformation may lead to emission reductions relative to present even without additional policies. An important outcome of this work is the scenario implementation approach which uses technology-specific discount rates to encourage scenario-specific technology and fuel choices. End-use energy demands are modified to approximate societal changes. This implementation allows the model to respond to perturbations in manners consistent with each scenario. In all scenarios, electricity continues to be generated by a mix of sources with the fraction of natural gas, coal, wind and solar differing between scenarios. Hybridization and electrification dominate light-duty transportation with transformational technology while paradigm shifts lead to enhanced use of biofuel. The benefit of this approach is that the scenarios can be utilized with other modeling approaches, creating multiple baselines upon which to model the impact of a new technology or policy.