Uncertainty Integration for a Transition in Energy and Sustainability

Description du projet

Repenser la planification énergétique dans un monde incertain

Les incertitudes géopolitiques et socio-économiques peuvent avoir un impact profond sur les politiques énergétiques et climatiques. Ces incertitudes profondes remettent en cause les évaluations analytiques qui servent de base à l’élaboration des politiques, augmentant ainsi le risque de ne pas atteindre les objectifs climatiques. Le projet UNITES, financé par le CER, aborde cette question en développant un nouveau paradigme pour la planification énergétique à long terme (qui intègre systématiquement l’incertitude dans les modèles énergie-climat). Le projet apportera trois contributions clés: des avancées théoriques pour saisir les différents types d’incertitude dans la planification énergétique; des données pour quantifier et caractériser les incertitudes d’entrée; et des méthodes d’IA pour distiller des résultats de modélisation complexes dans des perspectives politiques claires et exploitables. Grâce à cette approche, UNITES vise à aider les décideurs à élaborer des stratégies solides et flexibles.

Objectif

Geopolitical and socio-economic uncertainties are putting the European and Global energy transitions at stake. These deep uncertainties affect the analytical assessments underpinning energy and climate policies. For example, the models used to inform energy planning rely on uncertain forecasts and assumptions for future energy demands, macroeconomic indicators, social acceptance, fuel prices, technology costs, and climate scenarios. Due to fundamental methodological, computational, and data challenges, this uncertainty is at best rarely considered in energy planning, which increases the risk of failing to meet our urgent climate targets. This makes accounting for uncertainty one of the major unsolved problems in energy planning.

UNITES addresses these limitations to enable a new paradigm for long-term energy planning. In contrast to current approaches, which try to accurately predict the future, UNITES’ ambition is a systematic integration of uncertainty in energy-climate models. The project will result in three fundamental contributions: (i) theoretical developments to consider different types of uncertainty in energy planning models; (ii) data to quantify and characterize input uncertainties; (iii) AI methods to streamline the complex outputs of uncertainty studies into interpretable policy decisions.

The transferable and interdisciplinary developments across the data science, energy, and social sciences domains, unique to Europe and not available in concert elsewhere in the world, will bring about a breakthrough scientific contribution by overcoming important barriers for uncertainty analyses in a wide array of disciplines. The project will also be highly impactful on society, bringing together for the first time quantitative and qualitative dimensions to provide decision-makers with actionable policies to steer the energy transition, which will be central to ensuring that we can meet our climate neutrality targets in the face of a highly unpredictable future.