An Exploratory Model to Investigate the Dynamics of the World Energy System: A Biophysical Economics Perspective

An Exploratory Model to Investigate the Dynamics of the World Energy System: A Biophysical Economics Perspective

Mir Mohammadi Kooshknow, S.A.R.

Herder, P.M. (mentor)
Dijkema, G.P.J. (mentor)
Correlje, A.F. (mentor)
Ghorbani, A. (mentor)
Kamp, A. (mentor)

Technology, Policy and Management

Infrastructure Systems & Services

System Engineering, Policy Analysis and Management

2013-08-27

Energy is inherent part of our current life. No one can imagine living without it. It has changed the lifestyle of people and it will continue to do so in future. About 80% of current global total primary energy supply belongs to non-renewable resources. It is also expected that non-renewable resources dominate in total primary energy supply in next decades. The world is moving towards scarcity in non-renewable energy resources. Most studies about the world energy-economy system use standard economic theories. These theories do not include limitations of natural resources and the environment. Biophysical economics theory considers the relation between economy and natural resources. It has been used as the basis of various energy-economy models. However, those models have a global view on this system. They do not sufficiently provide insights into the properties and international trading behaviors of energy suppliers and consumers. So, they do not provide insight on the effects of these interactions on the emergent behavior of the global energy system. Biophysical economics has high potential for providing insights into the world energy system. However, the current biophysical models are not capable of representing the world energy system considering trade and other interactions among regions. Considering this problem the main research question in this thesis is stated as follow: What can be learnt from biophysical economics theory when it is used for the modeling of the world energy system considering energy trade? In order to answer this question, the objective of this research is set to develop a model for exploring the behaviors of the world energy system with multiple interacting regions. The theory of complex adaptive systems (CAS) is used to enable biophysical economics theory to consider trade and other interactions among regions. In order to model and analyze the world energy system from both biophysical economics and CAS perspective, agent-based modeling is identified as the most appropriate paradigm. This thesis provides an analysis of the world energy system from both technical and actor perspectives. The technical analysis aims at describing the main characteristics of and activities in the world energy system. It also identifies the main uncertainties within this system. Actor analysis aims at providing a regional decomposition for the world energy system. To achieve this goal, a number of current regional decompositions are identified. One of those is selected on the basis of a number of criteria. This research uses the 11-region decomposition of (IIASA, 2012b) To develop the objective model, a two-step approach is used. In the first step, the aggregated world energy model is developed without considering energy trade. In the second step, the multi-region world energy model is developed considering energy trade. The aggregated world energy model is the implementation of the most recent biophysical economics model in the literature, GEMBA by (M. A. J. Dale, 2010), in NetLogo. The multi-region model inherits all characteristics of the first model. However, it considers each world region as a world and facilitates the energy trade among them. The models are evaluated by comparison with historical data and literature. The multi-region model shows that the energy trade can be modeled and explored using the biophysical economics perspective. Since it includes energy price as a parameter, it also shows that energy trade can be an interface between biophysical economics and standard economics as well. In addition, exploratory experiments show that size of energy trade for regions is low in comparison to their total production/consumption. Moreover, they show that the size of total energy trade will peak and decline. It is because energy trade mostly belongs to non-renewable energy and the production of non-renewables will peak and decline in the future. In addition, it shows that lower energy trade can increase the share of production of energy.

biophysical economics
agent-based modeling
world energy system
world regions
exploratory modeling

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:de405dfa-74bf-445b-b96e-e06a92a4812c

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2013 Mir Mohammadi Kooshknow, S.A.R.