Purpose

The purpose of the model is to simulate the photovoltaic (PV) solar panel diffusion in a region with different subsidy schemes. Inspired by the slow uptake of PV despite the short pay back time.

Entities, State Variables

The model includes three types of agents;

1. the observer representing the political and economic market environment, is setting policy specific parameter (i.e. PV subsidies), market specific parameters (i.e. PV lifetime, panel-cost, efficiency, and grid electricity costs), but as well agent specific parameter (i.e. sensing radius, neighbour threshold, and interest rate).
2. house owners (turtles) living in a particular house deciding about the installation of a PV panel on their house, based on their social environment, and a cost-benefit analysis.
3. patches have different solar power generation potential based on their insolation (a function of the location on the landscape) and patch quality (shadow from other buildings and roof orientation, random factor between 30-100%) influencing the optimal yield. If there is a house on the patch, the values for panel size (roof size available for PV installation, random value between 10 and 40 m2) and PV attributes are set.

Scales

We use an artificial landscape of 100 x 100 patches, the time resolution is one years (one tick represents one year) and we run the model for 50 years.