Sandia National Laboratories: CASoS Engineering Application Background: Global Energy Systems

Application Background: Global Energy Systems

Evaluate effective means of achieving energy security or surety while meeting global carbon goals
For the GES, we delineated a set of three nested Goals at increasing scale. The goal at each scale is to create a pattern of energy supply that supports essential activities and that is robust to disruptions that arise from human activities (such as shifting economic and political relationships) and from the physical system (changes in climate and encountering boundaries of resource supply).

National Transportation Energy Security: specific energy need at the scale of the nation
National Energy Surety: all energy needs appropriately interconnected with other sectors (e.g., agriculture, economic output) at the scale of the nation
Global Energy Surety: all energy needs appropriately interconnected with other sectors at the scale of the globe

After defining the GES as a CASoS and an object of engineering, we formulated a conceptual model for multi-scale analysis of the GES to evaluate the effective means of achieving energy security or surety while meeting global carbon goals. The model represents interacting entities at a variety of scales (nations, industries, consumers) that have resources (material, funds, energy), technologies (transform resources, emit CO2) and competing needs (energy surety, standard-of-living).

A simplified version of the model was implemented and preliminary analyses of two test cases were conducted. The limited purpose of these simulations was to test the model’s ability to produce selected qualitative responses that would be expected in a real system that matched the model constraints: an overall increase in power price as a finite fuel resource is depleted, and an increase in power price and decrease in usage if carbon emissions associated with fossil fuel use are taxed. The behavior of the initial model conformed to important qualitative expectations about the real system.
As Next Steps to accomplish our objectives we will draw on and extend our new model constructed though this project. Three model extensions are required:

a more complex and complete basic economy in a single region
multiple regions with varying endowments reflective of mature, emerging, and developing economies
a larger set of regions and a hierarchical structure of market interactions among them to reflect nations interconnected by trade agreements and common or readily convertible currencies.

Analysis using the extended model will evaluate the components of surety and economic performance on a global and entity level and can be used to evaluate the robustness of the policy and the critical enablers required to create system resilience.
A conceptual view of the proposed model is shown below with regional trading and security agreements (brokers) connecting several nations that are likewise connected to others to define a global system of nested interdependencies.

This was the first project in which we implemented a structured application of the CASoS Engineering Framework. The conceptualization of the GES as a set of hierarchical entities that manage and exchange resources, and that use those resources both to sustain themselves and to create products for use in subsequent exchange is, by design, applicable to many kinds of systems operating at many different scales. The formalism can be used to describe many cases of biological and economic interaction involving specialization, competition, and interaction through flows of materials.

Sandia National Laboratories sponsored the initial effort in 2008 through Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) funds with continued support in FY09