Abstract for: Switching to Other Currents: Empowering Medellin’s Sustainable Energy Cluster through System Dynamics Tools

One of the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN is to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all. Medellin, the second most populated city in Colombia, is where the decisions of most of the electrical energy sector in this country are made, and its Sustainable Energy Cluster (SEC) plays a key role in those decisions. Keeping up with trends that are impacting the energy sector like climate change, peer-to-peer commercialization, distributed generation and digital transformation, the SEC decided to renovate its strategic planning in 2019 and asked POSSIBLE Solutions as a consulting firm with experience in management and technological solutions for their help. The first diagnosis is that the current mental model of the energy sector is insufficient to understand those trends in an endogenous way and therefore a System Dynamics (SD) model is in development. However, following the logic that it is more worthwhile to teach someone than do it for them, especially when talking about sustainability in the long term, the ultimate goal is to empower the SEC as policymakers through the modeling process and SD tools so that they make better autonomous decisions in the future.