Energy Policy Instrument Modeling in the Agent-Based Energy Model DiDo

Sammanfattning: This work is investigating how energy policy instruments can be depicted explicitly in DiDo, the re-gional agent-based energy transition model for the Netherlands designed by the TNO. Within DiDo the transition of the energy system is considered a result of individual transformations of the different stake-holders in the system. The focus of this work lies on household agents, their investment decision making and the effects of policy instruments on this microeconomic level. Bounded rationality, heuristics and individual attitudes and perceptions are identified to play a relevant role when investing in energy assets and thus an explicit parameterization of these particularities of human behavior is proposed. The model-ing of the investment decision is following a rational approach originating from finance that features the Markowitz portfolio optimization, which is relying on the return of investments (ROI) in assets. In order to incorporate behavioral aspects and perceptions into this rational frame, the concept of subjective ROI is introduced. Arising from recent developments in behavioral economics, this concept is in line with the observations made on financial markets that challenge the long maintained assumption of normally dis-tributed ROI distributions. Finally, surveying individual willingness to pay for energy assets and testing the correlation with behavioral and policy instrument aspects using a regression analysis is proposed as the subsequent methodological step.