Energy prospective models are essential tools for exploring different energy transition scenarios, assessing the impacts of energy and climate policies, fostering public debate and supporting decision-makers in planning policies, investments or infrastructure necessary to achieve specific objectives such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, they have certain limitations. They depend on data that may be incomplete, their approach is centered on CO₂ emissions and not on other environmental impacts, they do not integrate crisis scenarios or disruptive evolutions, they have difficulty taking into account the repercussions of interactions between global and local scales, and are difficult to use by non-specialists.
In this context, the DyMod project, coordinated by Sandrine Mathy (CNRS - GAEL) and Andriamasinoro Fenintsoa (BRGM), aims to develop dynamic models of demand and supply for subsurface resources (geothermal energy, gas storage, use of underground space, mineral resources) for French needs by 2050.
It involves developing models capable of:
- Taking into account the local specificities of the regions considered, linking with national evolution scenarios, and placing them in a global evolution.
- Integrating environmental impacts other than CO₂ emissions.
- Simulating trend or rupture evolutions in technological and social terms, or crises.
- Including short-term decision-making processes involving actors with varied interests.
Estimating demand for underground resources for different energy scenarios by 2050
Initial work consists of coupling existing models, whose scenarios are notably used by the IPCC, to estimate future demand for subsurface resources. The team plans to couple prospective models (POLES, simulation model, and TIMES, optimization model) with the MATER biophysical model to estimate the dynamics of raw material prices based on their cumulative consumption, and estimate national needs for primary and secondary materials. Beyond that, a challenge is to integrate environmental impacts other than CO₂ emissions, such as water consumption, into prospective models POLES and TIMES, in order to produce scenarios minimizing environmental impacts of low-carbon energy transition scenarios.
Regionalizing demand and local production capacities
Regionalizing models is a real challenge. It must take into account local specificities such as renewable energy potentials, terrain, subsurface availability and nature, socio-economic characteristics (industrial potential, transport and communication routes, current energy production, urban planning, population density, employment basin, etc.), as well as other cultural, regulatory and investment capacity dimensions.
Two major difficulties are identified:
- Regarding modeling demand at the local level, and therefore infrastructure evolution, it is not certain that the logistic functions usually used to model infrastructure and equipment saturation based on GDP/capita, and validated at national levels, can be used at the subnational level.
- Other variables are potentially necessary to reproduce historical trends observed at the regional scale. These variables could be average and extreme temperatures that influence construction type and insulation degree, terrain that influences city and exchange route development, or other parameters that must be identified. Assessment of local production potentials and potential interregional flows will give rise to data collection work for a selection of raw materials (historical evolution of geological potentials, concentration rates, budgets dedicated to exploration).
At least two regions will be studied, Occitania in collaboration with the Massif Central project of the Subsurface, Common Good program, and possibly the Paris Basin or Rhine Graben depending on available data.
The final objective of regionalization work is to couple demand dynamics with geographic information systems including transport infrastructure (materials, energy), urban infrastructure, local availability of resources and renewable energies, and subsurface access potentials. This will make it possible to estimate gaps between supply and demand in order to analyze the possible unavailability of certain materials in the future due to economic constraints, and to create feedback loops to study demand substitution mechanisms toward other available materials.
Creating a role-playing game and a video game to support debate among actors
The team also wishes to integrate the impact of actors' behaviors (citizens, industrialists, decision-makers, ...) with possibly divergent positions and interests, and will rely for this on the work of the targeted project ANTICIP of the Subsurface, Common Good PEPR, one of whose objectives is to identify involved actors and their specific issues.
These different agents will be integrated into the developed model according to their structure and decisions, through the methodology of agent-based models (ABM). It also involves integrating the geography and local resources of regions of interest (GIS tools to locate mines, accessible and impacted surfaces, population density, transport infrastructure, water availability, etc.).
The ABM model will first be intended for researchers, then associated with a playful component intended for stakeholders to allow them to explore and analyze the consequences of their decisions on trajectories. It will then involve creating role-playing games and video games on this basis to help better understand socio-economic metabolism (corresponding to all material and energy flows within a society) and to serve as support for debate among actors.
The project launch meeting, organized on June 11, 2024 at École Polytechnique, was an opportunity to present planned work and foster exchanges between project members and partners, particularly on issues of scenario regionalization and game objectives, in order to get work off to a good start.
Une partie des membres du projet et des partenaires réunis lors de la réunion de lancement
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