Abstract for: Hands-On Modeling United States Energy Policy: Achieving Emissions Targets and Exploring Scenarios

This workshop is a follow-up to my presentation titled “A Model of Energy Policy Impacts on Pollutant Emissions, Costs, and Social Benefits Developed for China’s Central Government.” This workshop is centered on an enhanced version of that model loaded with U.S. data and tuned to represent the United States. First, attendees will interact with the model via an online application we have constructed in Ruby that allows the model to be run on a webserver and results to be visualized in a web browser. Attendees will be challenged to construct policy packages that enable the U.S. to meet its stated emissions targets. Second, attendees will be encouraged to download the full Vensim model and use it to obtain more detailed output. A Python script to perform automated series of runs for statistical analysis will be demonstrated; users owning Vensim DSS can try it for themselves. After this workshop, attendees will have knowledge of the technical workings of the Policy Solutions model, an understanding of the support tools we have created (the web application and Python script), and will come away with ideas and new skills that they can apply to their own System Dynamics modeling projects.