
A critical challenge for the atmospheric sciences is to understand the anthropogenic impacts on atmospheric chemistry over spatial scales ranging from the urban to the regional, and ultimately to the global, and over corresponding time scales ranging from minutes to weeks and ultimately annual trends. A similar challenge for energy policymakers is to integrate an understanding of impact dynamics into the economic dynamics of energy supply and demand. The challenges of dynamic analysis of emissions impacts from the energy sector have substantially increased with a new focus on the emerging distributed generation sector. In this talk, we describe our efforts to build a sustained capability that can produce an integrated analysis of dynamic economic, meteorological and air chemistry impacts and effects from distributed energy resources (and ultimately from a diversity of combustion-based emissions.) Our approach explicitly integrates the economic demand/supply price dynamics with meteorology, emissions and atmospheric chemistry dynamics for application to optimized emissions regulation. The problem is challenging due to the inherent non-linearity of the photochemistry at all spatial scales, the difficulties in simultaneously representing atmospheric fluid dynamics at different scales within a numerical model, and the complex dynamics of the economics of electricity markets and distributed electricity demand and supply.Robert Van Buskirk, Ph.D. is a Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who specializes in developing economic cost/benefit models for efficiency standards evaluation under contract for the Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Other interests include development of hourly marginal cost models and statistical hourly demand models applied to efficiency policy cost/benefit analysis as well as production of water/energy/health policy cost/benefit models for developing country policy analyst partners.