EPRI’s US-REGEN model combines a technologically detailed electric sector model with a top-down computational general equilibrium (CGE) economy model. The latter does not represent end-use technologies explicitly, but instead models the trade-off between energy services and capital implicitly through elasticities of substitution.
EPRI initiated a project with Navius Research using the company’s Canadian Integrated Modeling System (CIMS)—a technologically detailed end-use demand model—to inform the choice of elasticities of substitution in the US-REGEN model. The elasticities were estimated from CIMS output.
A comparison of the two models found energy demands matched closely for most end uses, with some caveats. This work allows the US-REGEN model to better represent energy demand in the economy, including the potential for inter-fuel substitution and energy efficiency.