Energy-Economic Model

This research program was closed as of August 2018
Website content is current as of that date

The Population-Environment-Technology (PET) model is a global energy-economic model that provides the economic core of the integrated Population-Economy-Technology-Science (iPETS) model that underlies the work of the Integrated Assessment Modeling (IAM) group at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). PET is a multi-region, multi-sector computable general equilibrium (CGD) model with forward looking behavior. Currently, the standard (downloadable) configuration of the PET model has nine regions, five production sectors, and four types of consumer goods. However, the level of disaggregation is flexible, and the number of production sectors is being expanded to provide a more detailed representation of energy and agricultural industries. 

Background Information

The PET model originated in the 1990s as part of a Department of Energy-funded project led by economist Larry Goulder at Stanford University. The project also included current IAM collaborator Michael Dalton, who is now at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Continued development of the PET model by Dalton and colleagues, including those at the Population and Climate Change Program at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) focused on disaggregating the household sector in order to better represent demographic changes, such as aging and urbanization. 

Additional Information

Fortran source code for version 1.0 of the PET model is available below. This version was used to generate all of the scenarios in the 2010 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) paper on demographic influences on global carbon emissions. Documentation for the model can be found in the online supporting information to that paper, as well as in Dalton et al. (2008).

 [PET v1.0 zip file] [PNAS 2010 input/output zip files] [PET v1.0 readme PDF]

 

As of August 2018, version 2.0 of the iPETS model is about to be released, with code and complete documentation to be available at http://ipetsmodel.com/