About the Stochastic Energy Deployment System

The Stochastic Energy Deployment System (SEDS) model simulates whether and how markets will adopt new technologies depending on costs and performance relative to competing technologies. SEDS uses projections of how R&D may improve the performance of new technologies over time and will also evaluate the effects of R&D.

Also, it enables analysts to explore the effects of policies designed to accelerate development and adoption of energy sources with lower carbon emissions and reduce dependence on imported oil—such as cap-and-trade or carbon taxes and other incentives for renewable energies.

The objectives of SEDS include:

Simplicity, relative to the National Energy Modeling System, so that you can make changes and perform multiple runs in minutes rather than hours.
Transparency, so that you can easily review it and scrutinize its structure and assumptions.
Flexibility, so that you can easily modify the model and insert or replace modules.
Comprehensiveness, so that it covers all energy technologies that are now or may soon be important contributors to the U.S. energy/economics, including fossil fuels, renewable resources, and main demand sectors.
Capability of representing risk and uncertainty explicitly using probability distributions and the Monte Carlo method (or Latin hypercube sampling) to analyze uncertainties efficiently.
Open-source accessibility, meaning that anyone can access SEDS models easily, to download, review, run, and modify. Ultimately, we hope that many people will want to use, review, and improve SEDS, creating an ecosystem of modelers who build on each other's work.

To facilitate the development of stochastic models, SEDS developers used a commercially available modeling software, Analytica. This software provides numerous advantages to the development process and to the analyses that can be performed with SEDS.

SEDS was developed by a consortium of National Laboratories under leadership of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory with support of U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.