Session: CIE-05-01CIE Graduate Student Poster Symposium

Paper Number: 74718

Start Time: August 18, 10:00 AM

74718 - Modeling Consumer Behavior in Energy Systems 

Electricity is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, and the energy sector still relies heavily on fossil fuels. Individual behavior change can increase the efficiency of energy markets, and behavior change can be stimulated via intervention techniques such as incentives and fees and social norms. Energy markets consist of many stakeholders including consumers, generators, distributors, and governing bodies. Currently, designing energy policies, investing in new technologies and assets, understanding consumer behaviors, and quantifying social-environmental-economic impacts are often all considered individually, and their interactions are overlooked, resulting in a disconnect between desired results and ultimate impacts. To properly account for all of the interactions of electricity market systems, simultaneous considerations need to be made in a closed-loop system. Eliminating this disconnect will allow decisions to be made that will result in intentional and sustainable social, economic, and environmental outcomes. By understanding consumer behavior in energy markets and combining the results of psychological experiments and agent-based energy modeling, energy markets can be simulated under various policy structures to evaluate the social, environmental, and economic trade-offs among their outcomes. This interdisciplinary integration of consumer behavior and complex systems modeling will further the state of the are in energy market systems modeling and simulation.

Presenting Author: Gina Dello Russo Stevens Institute of Technology

Authors:

Gina Dello Russo Stevens Institute of Technology
Steven Hoffenson Stevens Institute of Technology