The transformation of a Country’s energy system, especially of energy-intensive activities, entails profound and pervasive changes in the whole Society, from Industry to Commerce and to the way people live. In this context, a number of questions are typically posed at a Country/regional level, for example how specific infrastructures might be evolving (e.g. refuelling stations), or the industries producing components for other technologies will need to transform or instead fail, or about the effects on occupation and job reskilling or, in the context of large infrastructures, when CCS should be enabled and deployed to contribute at its best to the reduction of CO2 emissions.
In tackling such questions, practical difficulties emerge: (1) the time interval to be considered is wide and should typically go beyond 2050; (2) it is impractical, and perhaps useless given the weight of external factors, to model the energy system of a given Country in detail for decades; (3) the evolution is not “mechanical” but depends on evolving policies, technologies, and preferences.
Many specialistic tool exist to perform such studies, with different granularity and modelling approaches that, in most cases, present the following limitations (separately or combined): need for extensive or proprietary information about plants of infrastructures, often unavailable to a broader audience; need for specific training and a long model set-up even to perform simple analyses; impossibility to introduce new technologies or new energy vectors, with their associated technical features, costs, incentives and limitations; finally lack of promoting an “active” approach from the user but tendency to deliver fixed and unique results, in which alternative hypotheses or sensitivities are difficult or impossible to explore.
We believe that for the benefit of younger engineers and economists, and for decision makers too, a more active and engaging approach could be fruitful (even necessary) to compare possibilities, identify misconceptions and get a deeper understanding of how sub-systems interact.
For this reason we have developed Country Vision, a web-based tool where different decarbonization options can be interactively set-up and compared in their evolution in the period 2025-2080 under the effect of new technologies (even hypothetical), new energy vectors, incentives, and policies.
A main design criterion has been to preserve real-time interactivity of the interface, but also represent the interactions among societal sectors and technologies, with their overall complexity. To keep this interactive spirit, Country Vision does not perform detailed hourly, daily, or seasonal variations of the energy flow and does not include detailed infrastructural information but it is based on freely available data (UNFCCC and Eurostat reports) and on user’s capability to introduce new vectors, price evolutions, new technologies and constraints. This flexible architecture also allows to describe some geographic-related effects.
