Evaluating sub-national building-energy efficiency policy options under uncertainty: Efficient sensitivity testing of alternative climate, technological, and socioeconomic futures in a regional integrated-assessment model

Michael J. Scott, Don S. Daly, Yuyu Zhou, Jennie S. Rice, Pralit L. Patel, Haewon C. McJeon, G. Page Kyle, Son H. Kim, Jiyong Eom and Leon E. Clarke

Energy Economics, 2014, vol. 43, issue C, 22-33

Abstract: Improving the energy efficiency of building stock, commercial equipment, and household appliances can have a major positive impact on energy use, carbon emissions, and building services. Sub-national regions such as the U.S. states wish to increase energy efficiency, reduce carbon emissions, or adapt to climate change. Evaluating sub-national policies to reduce energy use and emissions is difficult because of the large uncertainties in socioeconomic factors, technology performance and cost, and energy and climate policies. Climate change itself may undercut such policies. However, assessing all of the uncertainties of large-scale energy and climate models by performing thousands of model runs can be a significant modeling effort with its accompanying computational burden. By applying fractional–factorial methods to the GCAM-USA 50-state integrated-assessment model in the context of a particular policy question, this paper demonstrates how a decision-focused sensitivity analysis strategy can greatly reduce computational burden in the presence of uncertainty and reveal the important drivers for decisions and more detailed uncertainty analysis.

Keywords: Climate change; Mitigation and adaptation; Integrated-assessment; Sensitivity analysis; Design of computer experiments; Integrated-assessment modeling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C10 C13 C18 Q41 Q43 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140988314000152
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eneeco:v:43:y:2014:i:c:p:22-33

DOI: 10.1016/j.eneco.2014.01.012

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Economics is currently edited by R. S. J. Tol, Beng Ang, Lance Bachmeier, Perry Sadorsky, Ugur Soytas and J. P. Weyant

More articles in Energy Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().