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- Title
Complexity Tools For Smart Grids: PCT And ABM Join Forces.
- Authors
Varga, Liz
- Abstract
This paper presents an innovative way of combining existing complexity tools to offer a better description of the diffusion of distributed electricity generation and Smart Grid. These complexity tools are Personal Construct Theory (PCT) and Agent Based Modeling (ABM). The primary value of ABM is that it permits multiple iterations of a model using slightly different input conditions (or variables), demonstrating how small changes can be amplified as the dynamics of the system evolve. The challenge for ABM is to accurately capture the behavior (or rules) of individuals (or agents). Agent rules and associated variables in existing models are determined using a wide variety of research methods which are not usually stated explicitly. The culminating rules are often mechanical, treating agents as automaton, and so do not reflect the complex emergence of new variables in the system being modelled. PCT, and its associated structured interview methodology called Repertory Grid Technique, elicits from respondents a set of constructs which reflects how individuals understand their behavior (towards electricity generation and consumption), consciously or otherwise. The constructs of multiple respondents provide a legitimate set of increasingly mature constructs which describe evolving rules for differentiated behavior in Smart Grid adoption. These agent rules, together with environmental information, such as the technological trajectories of products, political/regulatory incentives/taxes, economic wealth, population structure, climate information and housing stock, allow the ABM to be developed for a particular region or country. Running the ABM will show barriers to adoption and allow interventions to be tested in order to speed an emerging landscape of increased distributed energy generation and more use of renewables. Importantly, interventions will be linked to both sustained, behavioral change and contextual settings making for a more robust description of the diffusion of Smart Grid.
- Subjects
ELECTRIC power production; MODELS &; modelmaking; REPERTORY grid technique; ELECTRICAL engineering; ELECTRIC power systems
- Publication
Emergence: Complexity & Organization, 2011, Vol 13, Issue 1/2, p57
- ISSN
1521-3250
- Publication type
Article