Texas National Energy Modeling Project (eBook)

An Experience in Large-Scale Model Transfer and Evaluation

Milton L. Holloway (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: EPUB

2013 | 1. Auflage
156 Seiten
Elsevier Science (Verlag)
978-1-4832-6090-7 (ISBN)

Infos

Texas National Energy Modeling Project: An Experience in Large-Scale Model Transfer and Evaluation reports on the Texas National Energy Model Project (TNEMP) experience. The TNEP was tasked with providing an independent evaluation of the Energy Information Administration's (EIA) Midterm Energy Forecasting System. It also provided recommendations to the Texas Energy Advisory Council concerning the maintenance of a national modeling system by the Council to evaluate Texas impacts within a consistent national modeling framework. The book provides all of the summary material documenting the entire experience, sequentially, from beginning to end. It first lays out the purposes of TNEMP, the organizational structure for the study, and an explanation of the evaluation criteria used to guide the model critiques. It summarizes in some detail the important findings of each of the 11 studies contained in Part II published under a separate cover. It presents the National Advisory Board's assessment of the integrity of the evaluation project, their views of important outcomes of the TNEMP experience, and important recommendations to TNEMP and EIA. The final chapters contain an overview reply by EIA and a summary of a workshop held at the end of the project to discuss substantive issues raised by TNEMP.

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PREFACE

Beneath the surface of the rather technical pages that follow lies a drama and adventure of some general significance. The purpose of this brief preface, written collectively by the Advisory Board to the Texas National Energy Modeling Project, is to try to capture something of that drama and adventure and to set the work in the context of some fundamental philosophical issues raised by the study.

As in all good drama, there is an element of conflict in this story. President Carter’s National Energy Plan (NEP), presented to Congress on April 20, 1977, took on a character greatly different from that proposed by two previous administrations. Although apparently using the same computer models as previous administration proposals and analyses, the supporting analysis for NEP resulted in very different projections of the nation’s energy supply, demand and import balance, with and without the NEP. Further, the NEP emphasized policies intended to stimulate conservation with relatively little attention to encouraging production, a radical change from previous administrations. Most prominent of the new policies proposed in the NEP was a ceiling price for natural gas in the heretofore unregulated intrastate market; a wellhead tax for oil which would, when added to the regulated wellhead price, capture for the federal treasury the difference between the current price and the world oil price set by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC); and a mandatory system of boiler fuel conversions for utilities and major fuel-using industries.

Energy experts in Texas examined these policies and the supporting projections with some care. They concluded that the plan’s expectations for abating the growing foreign crude oil imports to the U.S. could not be achieved under the policies which focused on conservation while not facing up to the conditions required to achieve NEP’s production goals. Therefore, they had grave reservations about the realism of the oil, gas, coal and nuclear energy production targets projected as a result of NEP policies.

In the normal way scholars proceed when differences arise, the Texas experts asked the Federal Government for the assumptions and calculations which had led to NEP projections for 1985, in particular those relating to natural gas and oil production. It was generally known that these were embedded in a computerized system of interacting models then called the Project Independence Evaluation System (PIES).

Many months passed without a satisfactory response from Washington. The Executive Director of the Texas Energy Advisory Council (TEAC), in consultation with Lieutenant Governor William P. Hobby, the Texas Office of State/Federal Relations in Washington, D.C., and the academic experts at The University of Texas and the University of Houston, decided to request that the Federal Government, under the Freedom of Information Act, turn over its energy model for full professional study and critical analysis. The formal request was made during October 1977.

At just about this time the organization of the Department of Energy (DOE) was being put together following its creation by the 95th Congress (PL 95-91, August 3, 1977), including within it an Energy Information Administration (EIA). EIA was given a rather interesting mandate by Congress, calling for (1) improved procedures to ensure credible energy data and analyses and (2) independence from the policy making offices of DOE and the Administration. These provisions reflected the judgment of Congress that a supportable national energy policy required a flow of information as reliable and politically uncolored as fallible human beings of integrity could make it.

EIA did not take the matter of the Freedom of Information Request seriously. The Texas group considered the lack of a response to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law a serious matter. The TEAC Executive Director brought the matter to the attention of the Council Chairman, Lieutenant Governor Hobby. An emergency meeting of the Council was called, a resolution to Secretary Schlesinger and to members of the Congressional energy committees was adopted, and a meeting was scheduled between the Secretary and Lieutenant Governor Hobby.

A major Texas evaluation exercise was then organized, both to transfer and to evaluate the model—a process described in Chapter 1 of this report. In this setting, EIA eventually decided to drop its quasi-adversary posture towards the probing from Texas and cooperate in the transfer of the model. During the course of the transfer and evaluation, the drama became something of a shared adventure.

The broad significance of the adventure is simply this. Computers permit mathematical calculations to be made at a rate hardly conceivable in earlier times. This capacity, in turn, permits the implications of certain theoretically assumed relations to be worked out following a procedure involving the interaction of many more variables than could be handled in the pre-computer world. Results can then be compared with what has happened in the past, and projections can be made. In computer modeling variables must be defined and assumptions stated precisely; vast amounts of data must be collected and organized; the variables must be linked through equations and other quantitative relations, usually based on past experience; and the computer can then roll out the implications of these equations and quantitative relations in the form of impressive printouts.

This kind of business, for good or ill, goes on in many government departments as well as in the private business sector, universities, and research centers. In its logical essence, model-building is quite simple. In practice, it has become a highly specialized and complex profession.

So far as government in a democracy is concerned, the use of computerized models raises a fundamental question: How are those outside the government to have confidence that the results of this process are worth a damn? Members of the Congress, state officials, interested private groups and the average citizen all are vitally concerned that the equations and the assumed quantitative relations reflect reasonably sound, even if stylized, approximation of how parts of the active world actually work. But without some method for piercing the wall behind which these arcane modeling operations proceed, outsiders are confronted by an enigmatic black box. An answer comes out of the box—a Delphic oracle that speaks in numbers. What goes on inside the black box is hidden. A democracy cannot live comfortably with this kind of jiggery-pokery. Debate in a democracy requires that the assumptions underlying policy conclusions be rendered, in the end, explicit. It also requires that affected people be able to know and understand—know what kind of data and assumptions go in and by what logic or process conclusions are drawn; until they know these, models lack credibility with them.

Thoughtful modelers have been quite conscious of this problem. They have considered with much care how the models used in government can be set up also outside government; how their equations and quantitative relations should be examined and criticized; and what the areas of common ignorance, the issues for debate, and the tasks revealed for future research and study are. For the EIA, the Texas exercise involved, no doubt, a diversion of scarce time; but it was also a unique opportunity to validate the integrity of its modeling efforts.

A more important question of philosophy has been brought to the surface in this exercise. The idea that models and modelers should be totally isolated from interested users is an issue of great importance. The Texas group believes that to ignore feedback from interested parties and users is to lose a vital source of information, leading to irrelevance and ignorance on the part of modelers. While some insulation is certainly needed, isolation is ill advised. Deliberate avenues of interaction with users such as the Texas group need to be structured as an ongoing part of an agency’s model development and model use program. Further, we believe that knowledge about values, non-monetary as well as monetary, can be handled objectively and explicitly, and is required. It is not objective to avoid the value questions which are at the heart of problems involving energy.

The reader should be aware that large-scale model evaluation and transfer is not a trivial task. For those in Texas who had forced the opening of this particular black box, success involved a sobering challenge with three dimensions.

First, experts had to be found capable of effecting the transfer of the model to a computer in Texas. This involved vastly more than mailing the computer tapes from Washington, D.C., to College Station where the Texas A&M computer is located. It required the tracking down of all manner of precise information which had not been well documented and filed in the midst of the day-to-day workings of a hard pressed Washington bureaucracy. Together the Texas and EIA computer experts managed to effect the transfer—a task complicated by the fact that the computers at the two places were not identical. It did not prove possible wholly to reproduce the model which underlies the NEP; but the model underlying the EIA April 1978 Administrator’s Annual Report to the Congress has, to all intents and purposes, been successfully set up and used in Texas.

We would underline here a major substantive conclusion of this project: the transfer of a model is not an antiseptic...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 22.10.2013
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften ► Physik / Astronomie
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► Wirtschaftsrecht
• Themenwelt: Technik ► Elektrotechnik / Energietechnik
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Rechnungswesen / Bilanzen
• Themenwelt: Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Spezielle Betriebswirtschaftslehre ► Immobilienwirtschaft
• ISBN-10: 1-4832-6090-9 / 1483260909
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4832-6090-7 / 9781483260907