Abstract for: Energy Equipment Diffusion & Touristic Competitiveness: Building of an SD Model for the Greek Islands

The real-world problem the research aims to address is the continuing highly seasonal, exponential electricity demand growth in the Greek islands that are unconnected to the national electricity grid over the past decades. This paper presents only part of the on-going research. It specifically tests an early draft of the sub-model concerned with the interplay of an island’s tourism volume & attractiveness, local technological learning-by-using effects and the dynamics of demand-side equipment diffusion. The general assumption is that a tourist chooses a basket of services received at the place visited, one of which is cooling comfort. Cooling-comfort eventually translates to installed cooling capacity and in effect electricity consumption. This paper examines the sub-model which, based on a figure of cooling comfort per person, constructs an indicator of competitiveness to similar destinations and relates the flow of tourists to it. Similarly, a cost comparison incorporating a learning curve between a conventional and an efficient variant of cooling equipment drives the installation stocks at any time and effectively alters the efficiency of the overall service across the island. The sub-model is run for a number of structural and behavioural tests and also assessed for its potential use in policy making.