Drawing from the best: Approaches to modeling China’s energy economy

About the workshop 

KAPSARC and the EIA jointly convened a workshop in June 2014 with fourteen Chinese modeling experts to facilitate a dialogue on the current trends and challenges in modeling China’s Energy Economy, a core part of KAPSARC’s own China Research Program. The workshop was held under the Chatham House Rule or capturing the discussion under a non-attribution basis.

Participants submitted a two page template describing their own model’s scope and major features. These can be viewed and downloaded from the KAPSARC website http://www.kapsarc.org under “Publications”

Summary

KAPSARC and the US EIA jointly convened a working group meeting on June 3, 2014 in Beijing on modeling the Chinese energy economy. This introduced the different models and methods currently being pursued by different stakeholders and so facilitate collaboration in a highly technical and demanding research space. Understanding the Chinese energy economy is of great importance to policy makers inside and outside China. 

All the models presented could be used as tools for analyzing the effects of various policy options. Yet all took different approaches to look at different aspects of China’s increasingly complex whole. The various experiences of the participants can help improve both the capability and accessibility of technical economic models. At the heart of the discussions was an attempt to support China’s continued development and economic transition and to make the process and consequences more understandable to those outside its borders. 

The following three desirable trends were identified: 

- Maintaining local detail while expanding model scope; 

- Integration of energy models with macroeconomic models; and 

- Making policies integral to models. Three associated challenges were also identified as requiring further work: 

- Predictability and consistency of future policies; 

- Data quality: availability and consistency; and - Post-solution analysis. This working group meeting brief elaborates on the six themes. 

Summaries of the contributions of the working group participants can be accessed at www.kapsarc.org.