Energy system models are crucial for planning the energy transition, but we need further analysis to fully grasp their potential. The concept of socio-economic-technical feasibility space considers impacts across areas like climate change, supply chain vulnerabilities, labor effects, economic development, distributional impacts, environmental justice, energy equity, and social acceptability. Embracing this approach provides a more comprehensive perspective on the challenges and opportunities of energy transitions, allowing the assessment of the co-evolution of the social, economic and energy systems.
A new generation of energy systems models integrating socio-economic aspects such as consumers' and corporate energy behavior is being developed at the Energy Economics group of PSI. The frontrunner is called SEED. The Socio-Economic Energy Model for Digitalization (SEED) quantifies digitalization's impacts on technology investment choices, energy consumption, and emissions in different energy sectors. It belongs to the class of Agent Based Models and simulates the decision processes of various heterogenous actors of the energy system: households, services sectors and industry sectors. These decision processes relate to the adoption of digital services and practices, as well as the investment in end-use energy technologies to support them. The model represents a large set of complex interactions between its actors, such as peer effects, producer-consumer relationships and employee-employer relationships. It can also be linked to the Swiss TIMES energy system model (STEM) to evaluate broader implications to the energy supply and infrastructure arising from the decisions of the SEED actors. The current article formally describes the SEED model based on the Overview Design Concept and Details (ODD) protocol. It also lists its main features, assumptions and data sources.
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