SENTINEL

Abstract:

Fossil energy created today’s industrial society, and yet fossil energy is destroying the environment on which that veneer of civilization depends. It falls on our generation to rebuild, as quickly as possible, the energy system into one that is sustainable. Energy system models are indispensible for this task, offering a virtual laboratory for experimenting with design choices end exploring their implications. The models currently being used by policy-makers, however, are not aligned with the magnitude of this challenge as we now understand it. It is important for Europe to develop a new framework for modelling energy systems, one that reflects the need to fundamentally redesign that system around non-fossil energy sources. 
We propose to develop, test, and make freely available a modelling framework that can allow a wide range of decision-makers to address the critical design challenges they now confront. The framework we propose is fundamentally different from those currently in use. In crucial ways it will be built with a renewable energy system in mind – taking into account their particular temporal and geographic issues – rather than adapted to include a rising shares of renewables. Related to this, than a single, large, self-contained monolithic model like many of the key models that exist now, we propose a platform on which a suite of highly specialized models can be linked together as users’ needs require. By ensuring that models are fully open and transparent – perhaps most importantly containing open input data – and developing standard protocols for linking information flows between them, we ensure that new specialized models can be added to this framework as new challenges, or issues requiring investigation, arise.