Ad Seebregts

Energy/Environmental Modeling with the MARKAL Family of Models

This article presents an overview and a flavour of almost two decades of MARKAL model developments and selected applications. The MARKAL family of models has been contributing to energy/environmental planning since the early J980’s. Under the auspices of the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Energy Technology Systems Analysis Programme (ETSAP) the model started as a linear programming (LP) application focused strictly on the integrated assessment of energy systems. It was followed by a non-linear programming (NLP) formulation which combines the ‘bottom-up’ technology model with a ‘top-down’ simplified macro-economic model. In recent years, the family was enlarged by members to model material flows, to employ stochastic programming (SP) to address future uncertainties, to model endogenous technology learning using mixed integer programming (MIP) techniques, and to model multiple regions (NLP/LP).