Development of an Energy-Based Model for Forecasting the Energy Demand of Colombia-Energia renovable en el sistema electrico nacional: demanda y comportamiento economico

To meet the ever-growing energy demand, utility resource planners must forecast future electricity consumption and model potential requirements to meet that predicted demand. As for Colombia, the National Interconnected System (SIN) connects only 48% of the national territory; leaving 52% of the country’s area out of the grid. Furthermore, Colombia’s non-conventional resources, FNCE in Spanish, account for only 0.1% of the total energy generation. These margins have brought the attention of national and international private investors to invest in the power generation of the country not only for extending the national grid but also for diversifying the current energy mix of the country. In fact, the new Renewable Energy Law of Colombia, Law 1715, is committed to diversifying Colombia’s energy mix through the implementations of renewable energy projects into the energy demand planning of the country.
Furthermore, Colombia is a developing country marked by political, social, and military events. These events have been detrimental to all sectors of society, including aspects that account for the energy demand and the economy of the country. With the vision of a new Colombia that recently agreed to end the armed conflict the Empresa Colombiana de Petroleos S.A.(ECOPETROL) and UPME partnered to develop the first long-term future energy scenario study of Colombia where the complexity and the strong relationship that social behavior has on the economy of Colombia was considered in the prospective study.
This study led to the involvement of the top three universities of the region; Universidad Autonoma de Bucaramanga (UNAB), Universidad Industrial de Santander (UIS), and Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana (UPB) in working with UPME and ECOPETROL to develop the first integrated EPM model of Colombia. However, this energy model only accounts for the economic factors that represent the current behavior of the energy demand of the country leaving outside climate and social behavior factors that are crucial for twenty-first-century energy challenges which attribute to climate impact and resource depletion.
Therefore, this project will develop a base-model that will allow for the study of the criteria of the variables that dictate the energy demand of Colombia using statistic approaches and reviewing national and international prospective methodologies; the research will study the social, environmental, economic, and international trade factors of Colombia. For this planning exercise, the residential energy sector is selected due to the unobserved social and climate factors that manifest in this sector.