Project Overview

There is a consensus that future energy technologies have not been adopted by the society to the degree that might be justified. In this project, we will develop an agent-based model to study how social networks affect transition dynamics toward future energy systems. We include two types of agents in our model: individuals and firms. Individuals affect energy transition directly through their energy consumption choices and indirectly through their voting of policies. Social networks play a critical role in the formation of individual attitudes and ultimately vote for policies. Firm investment decisions are affected by market forces, energy policies, and other firm characteristics. We will run simulations to access the impacts of social networks on the transition dynamics under different scenarios (e.g., carbon prices, costs of renewable energies).