ECLIPSE: An integrated energy-economy model for climate policy and scenario analysis

This paper describes the development of the Energy and Climate Policy and Scenario Evaluation (ECLIPSE) model—a flexible integrated assessment tool for energy and climate change policy and scenario assessment. This tool builds on earlier efforts to link top-down and bottom-up models, and combines a macroeconomic energy demand model and a consumer-budget transport demand model with the technology-rich bottom-up energy and transport system model Energy Research and Investment Strategy (ERIS), and solves the models iteratively. Compared to previous efforts, ECLIPSE includes many new features, such as a more disaggregated production function, improved calibration and parameterization and separate modeling of passenger transport demand. The separate modeling of transportation makes ECLIPSE particularly well-suited to analyzing interactions between the transport sector and the broader energy market and economy. This paper presents results illustrating some features of the integrated model, compares technology deployment results with ECLIPSE and the bottom-up ERIS model, and briefly describes illustrative baseline and greenhouse gas mitigation scenarios to highlight some of the features of the framework outlined in this paper. A number of modeling and policy insights arising from this scenario analysis are discussed.