Low-carbon society: an enhanced modelling tool for the transition to sustainability

Decision-makers in governments need to be able to make informed decisions about feasible and effective pathways towards a low-carbon society. The EU-funded LOCOMOTION project responds to this need. Building on the existing Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) developed in the EU-funded MEDEAS project, a number of substantive improvements are planned with respect to the state-of-the-art in energy-economy-environment modelling. These include several actions, such as the expansion of the geographical coverage and improving the IAMs by increasing the detail and precision of existing modules and adding new ones. The results of the project will be open source and available to scientists and modelling experts as open source software in Python with extensive technical documentation. Public decision-makers will benefit from user-friendly application for own analysis. Civil society will be able to use web interface and educational simulation game.

Advances regarding the increased detail and precision of the modules of the WILIAM model:

Economic & financial module.
•Dynamic technical coefficients for Input-Output (IO) Tables. Two methods have been designed based on the variation of energy intensities and the prices of energy products.
•Upgraded household consumption representation. It will apply only to Europe, based on the results of consumer surveys of 200,000 European households.
•Upgraded firms’ production representation.
•Representation of governmental consumption, linking the main macroeconomic magnitudes to the governmental expenditure by function. The functions have been ddeveloped.
•Integration of a new financial sub-module using the Stock-Flow Consistent approach. The functions of have been developed.
•Labour modelling. The functions of this feature have been developed.
•Quantification of climate change impacts and adaptation endogenously, with identification of climate-sensitive sectors, quantification of sectoral impacts and estimation of adaptation costs.

Energy module:
•Dynamic and endogenous computation of the Energy Return on Investment (EROI) at technology and system levels for RES technologies.
•Bottom-up modelling of technologies associated with transport energy consumption.
•Representation of the intermittent character of the RES and technological solutions to handle it (storage, overcapacities, etc.).
•Allocation of energy technologies following monetary and biophysical (e.g. EROI) criteria.
•Consistent integration with the economic & financial module for a better characterization of the economic feedback of technological change in the energy sector, the relation of energy consumption and income levels, the consistent integration of economic (monetary) investments and energy investments (EROI) and the feedback of potential energy scarcity on economic sectors.

Population and society module
•Disaggregation of population in age and income cohorts, and sex.
•Feedbacks from the other modules to assess social and demographic impacts, including Sustainable Development Goals.
•Social differences in income, age or sex to assess specific energy and material consumption patterns.

Environmental module.
•Carbon footprint. Update of information from different climatic models. Damage functions on the impact of climate change are being developed.
•Land constraints & water consumption. The structure and functional relationships of the modules have been designed.

Non-energetic materials module.
The characteristics and structure of this module were defined.

Advances regarding the improved scenario assessment:
•A review of policies has been carried out, resulting in over 1,000 identified policies.
•Advance in defining alternative storylines have been made.

Advances regarding the enhanced usability of the WILIAM model:
To enable the use of the model for users without programming skills, two user-friendly and target group specific interfaces will be developed. Following a stakeholder mapping exercise, an online survey was carried out to find out about the needs and preferences of potential users of the tools (“co-design”). This resulted in the definition of technical specifications, functional and non-functional requirements, tool architecture and the development of first mockups.