Forecasting White Certificate flows with system dynamics

In France, within the frame of White Certificate scheme, a specified amount of energy savings has to be achieved over three-year periods. The main participants to this system are public authorities, who set the level of energy savings, energy companies, who must reach the target, manufacturers, who develop energy-efficient products and the end-users of the efficient solutions. The third period of this scheme has started in 2015, with a target of savings of around 700 TWhcumac. This paper is unusual, because it focuses on industry and services, which now count for more than 20% of the total savings. The aim of the study is to propose a new methodology to analyze and predict the White Certificates flows in industry and services and give an overview of the preliminary results obtained in this frame. First, the scheme participants were interviewed in depth to identify its main drivers. Then, a system dynamics method was used to split those significant factors in temporal functions such as marketing information, learning effect and financial incentives effect, and to model their evolution. These functions come from the Bass Diffusion Model, which describes the process of how new products are adopted. The challenge was to collect data to calibrate the model, in particular the savings potential for each energy-efficient action, the energy savings flows observed in the past and the commercial incentives over time. The data used for this study come from public authorities (source: EMMY) and the French electricity company EDF. The first results confirm the significant role of marketing information in the adoption of energy-efficient actions and highlight counter-intuitive side effects such as the impact of financial incentives: they do not seem to be the main drivers, but function as an accelerator role. With the developed method, it is now possible to split and mathematically describe the main drivers of the mechanism. This is useful to qualify the potential impact that some changes in the scheme could have (update of energy savings actions, new level of obligation, evolution in financial incentives and others). The results given by the model can thus provide guidance for the next regulatory period.