PART I: TIMES CONCEPTS AND THEORYΒΆ

Part I comprises five divisions, each containing a number of chapters:

  • Chapters 1 and 2 provide a general overview of the representation in TIMES of the Reference Energy System (RES) of a typical region or country, focusing on its basic elements, namely technologies and commodities.

  • Chapters 3 to 7 describe the core TIMES model generator, i.e. the dynamic partial equilibrium version with perfect foresight: Chapter 3 discusses the economic rationale of the model, and Chapter 4 describes in more detail than Chapter 3 the elastic demand feature and other economic and mathematical properties of the TIMES equilibrium. Chapter 5 presents a streamlined representation of the Linear Program used by TIMES to compute the equilibrium. Chapter 6 describes a new TIMES feature for conducting systematic sensitivity analyses. Chapter 7 describes the Climate Module of TIMES.

  • Chapters 8 to 11 contain descriptions of 4 extensions or variants that, if used, depart from the assumptions of the core model in a way that alters the nature of the equilibrium: Chapter 8 covers the stochastic programming variant, which no longer assumes perfect foresight, but rather imperfect foresight; Chapter 9 describes the myopic use of TIMES, which violates the perfect foresight property and replaces it with limited foresight; Chapter 10 describes the lumpy investment variant where some decisions are discrete rather than continuous, and thus violate the convexity property; Chapter 11 describes the endogenous technology learning extension, also involving non-convex elements.

  • Chapter 12 is devoted to two extensions that make TIMES into a General Equilibrium model, namely ES-MACRO and TIMES-MERGE-MACRO.

  • Chapters 13 and 14 constitute appendices that may be of interest to readers at any point in their use of the rest of the text. Chapter 13 provides a brief history and comparison of TIMES and MARKAL, the modeling framework that preceded TIMES. Chapter 14 provides a short review of the theoretical foundation of Linear Programming and the interpretation of the dual solution of a linear program.