…don’t even think about coding before you’ve got the program designed.
Ha – easier said than done! As anyone who’s ever been bitten by the programming bug would tell you, it’s much more fun to just start typing. You want to see if it works. You’ll try out little bits and pieces, saying “I’ll just sketch it out”, “let’s make sure I can get these functions to talking to each other” and so on. Before you know it, you’ve got this big unwieldly mess of code and you can’t remember what it was supposed to do.
While I’d like to say I’ve finally learned this lesson, I haven’t. I’ve already started coding bits and pieces of my model, “just to see if it works”. But before I get too carried away, I should really outline what I want my model to do.
General Aims
- Model the entire domestic energy consumption system.
Obviously that’s not going to happen all at once but I’m going to structure the model in a modular fashion so that I can introduce bits and pieces over time.
Specific Aims
I’m studying behavioural responses to solar photovoltaics in the UK domestic sector and there are a few specific things that I need to check through modelling. Hopefully this will provide a chance to sketch out and evaluate the model. In other words, after this modelling is done I should have a framework which should be usable in other contexts without too much modification. Anyway these goals are:
- Confirm household savings
- Evaluate potential savings
- Policy Experimentation
I’ve interviewed PV households and they estimated their changes in energy consumption but also mentioned specific changes in behaviour. I hope to simulate these individual changes and see if the total adds up.
I also have a good picture of the energy consumption environment of PV households. I hope to use the model to build on this knowledge and evaluate the maximum potential savings.
If the first two go well, then perhaps I can try a few experiments to see how different policies might affect energy consumption. For example, the impact of grants on PV diffusion or premium feed-in tariffs to change time-of-use.
Before I code anymore, I clearly need to narrow these down more. But that’s for later.
