Modelling the transition to a low-carbon energy supply

Abstract: A transition to a low-carbon electricity supply is crucial to limit the impacts of climate change. Reducing carbon emissions could help prevent the world from reaching a tipping point, where runaway emissions are likely. Runaway emissions could lead to extremes in weather conditions around the world -- especially in problematic regions unable to cope with these conditions. However, the movement to a low-carbon energy supply can not happen instantaneously due to the existing fossil-fuel infrastructure and the requirement to maintain a reliable energy supply. Therefore, a low-carbon transition is required, however, the decisions various stakeholders should make over the coming decades to reduce these carbon emissions are not obvious. This is due to many long-term uncertainties, such as electricity, fuel and generation costs, human behaviour and the size of electricity demand. A well choreographed low-carbon transition is, therefore, required between all of the heterogenous actors in the system, as opposed to changing the behaviour of a single, centralised actor. The objective of this thesis is to create a novel, open-source agent-based model to better understand the manner in which the whole electricity market reacts to different factors using state-of-the-art machine learning and artificial intelligence methods. In contrast to other works, this thesis looks at both the long-term and short-term impact that different behaviours have on the electricity market by using these state-of-the-art methods.