Getting the best out of energy system models to support climate policymaking

Generally speaking, policy making is a complex process. However, certain types of policies are particularly challenging, such as climate change policy. This is due to the importance and complexity of the problem, which is global in nature and scale and it is linked to pretty much all human activities. Given the scale and complexity of the climate policy challenge, policy makers rely on a variety of sources to inform policy decisions, including the opinion and advice of stakeholders and experts, and the use of models. To assess how 'good' a model is, as well as thinking about how it is being applied and its outputs used, it is necessary to 'validate' it by contrasting its results with reality. Unfortunately, the more complex the model is, the more difficult is to validate it, and in some cases a formal validation is not possible or practical. TIMES is such a model. In order to ‘trust’ the results of TIMES, it is important to understand its limitations, assumptions, modelling considerations, and input data