Home

2007-08 Seminars

"Realistic Regional Energy Efficiency and Conservation Supply Curves for the Residential Sector: First Steps."

Inês Lima Azevedo
Carnegie Mellon University

Abstract
Global climate change is becoming an increasingly important problem and an enormous amount of effort has been devoted to understanding potential mitigation policies. In addition to climate change, concerns of affordability, security and reliability of energy supply provide grounds for directing attention towards energy efficiency and conservation. Although energy efficiency and conservation strategies are now beginning to be included in the portfolios of carbon mitigation strategies, there is still large uncertainty concerning the magnitude of the impact that conservation could achieve and the associated cost of implementation of such strategies. This work provides a first attempt to model energy efficiency potential savings and respective costs for the US residential sector, up to 2030, at the Census Division level. The model has several particular features: (i) it accounts for different agents' perspectives on the cost of efficiency; (ii) it is built in a modular form, to facilitate its posterior implementation in Analytica® and the subsequent addition of new data; (iii) it provides a user interface to allow a change in the main parameters of the model. The model is at an early stage of development. Over time as better data become available and the model is refined, it should be possible to improve the results.