Future of Energy: M. Granger Morgan

March 12, 2014 "What Can We Hope to Know About the Future of the Energy System?" with M. Granger Morgan, University and Lord Chair Professor of Engineering; Head and Professor, Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University"What Can We Hope to Know About the Future of the Energy System?" with M. Granger Morgan, University and Lord Chair Professor of Engineering; Head and Professor, Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University

Twenty years ago with Hadi Dowlatabadi, Morgan built one of the first detailed integrated assessment models to explore the likely future evolution of the energy system and associated climate impacts. Unlike virtually all integrated assessment models in use today their ICAM model included an extensive treatment of uncertainty in model functional form as well as uncertainty in the value of specific coefficients. They found that within a very wide range, they could get almost any answer they wanted depending on the assumptions made and concluded that using integrated assessment to search for optimal global climate policy made no sense.

Subsequently, Morgan has conducted a wide range of more focused studies of specific parts of the energy system. In parallel, he has done work that critically assessed methods of scenario analysis and energy forecasting. In this talk, Morgan will briefly recap some of this previous work and then discuss, and seek suggestions on, a number of issues related to doing a better job of incorporating uncertainty into energy forecasts that he plans to explore over the course of the next several years.

Biography
M. Granger Morgan is Professor and Head of the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University where he is also University and Lord Chair Professor in Engineering. In addition, he holds academic appointments in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and in the H. John Heinz III College. His research addresses problems in science, technology and public policy with a particular focus on energy, environmental systems, climate change and risk analysis. Much of his work has involved the development and demonstration of methods to characterize and treat uncertainty in quantitative policy analysis. At Carnegie Mellon, Morgan directs the NSF Center for Climate and Energy Decision Making. He is also director of the newly-formed campus-wide Wilton E.Scott Institute for Energy Innovation. Morgan serves as Chair of the Scientific and Technical Council for the International Risk Governance Council. In the recent past, he served as Chair of the Science Advisory Board of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and as Chair of the Advisory Council of the Electric Power Research Institute, of which he is now again a member. He holds a BA from Harvard College (1963) where he concentrated in Physics, an MS in Astronomy and Space Science from Cornell (1965) and a Ph.D. from the Department of Applied Physics and Information Sciences at the University of California at San Diego (1969).