Step 6

Instructions

So far, you have gone through the process of designing a pathway or roadmap for the future and calculating the economic consequences of the set of assumptions/decisions that went into the roadmap. Now, the idea is to fiddle around with it to see if you can lower the costs, and remember that the best thing to compare here is the sum of the total costs per capita (in thousands of dollars per person), which is plotted on page 13 of the graph pad. Your best model from an economic standpoint is the one that generates the lowest value for this parameter.

In other words, you return to the earlier steps in this process, make a change, and then compare the costs with your previous version. As you do this, you will learn what kinds of changes lead to lower costs and you will eventually find the best roadmap (and remember that you also have to be able to justify it). One thing that you should do is to see if you can get a better economic result by keeping the global temperature well below the 2°C limit — in other words, go back to Step 1 and alter the carbon emissions curve to give you a lower temperature and then keep all of the other parts of the model the same, then run it again and see if you can get the sum of total costs per capita lower.

For guidance on how to do this step, see the video below — Capstone Step 6 Instructions.

Video: Capstone Project Step 6 Instructions (3:18)

Click here for a video transcript of "Capstone Project Step 6 Instructions".

PRESENTER: Now Step 6 of the project is pretty simple. We just turn to page 13 of the graph pad, and we look at the sum of the energy conservation and climate costs per person.

And so, this is going to be in thousands of dollars per person that's added up over time. So, this is a cumulative amount over this 200 year period, roughly. And you can see in our case here we’ve gotten that up to $600,000 dollars per person. And so, you know, you divide that by roughly 200 years and that averages out to like three thousand dollars per person, per year, in all of these costs, so, energy conservation and climate related costs.

So, that's each person's share. And this is the thing that we're trying to minimize, because if we can keep this as low as possible then that leaves more money for the rest of the economy, or the things the economy would do like, you know, health care, education, research, all these things that would contribute to a higher quality of life. So, this is, our goal is to minimize this. And so, you know you're going to include a screenshot of this page in in your project report, your poster, and talk about it a little bit.

But let me just show you what you're going to do. So, you get to this point Step 6, now what you want to do is to make some changes and then compare this first initial curve with something else. So, I'll change the carbon emissions to do something like this, drop off towards zero here shortly. So, if we run it with that and look at this same graph we see, okay we lower it significantly in that case. So, now we're down to 266, so that's better. And then you might, you know you could change the renewable energy portfolio again. You could change the fossil fuel allocations. You could make all these kinds of changes. You could reduce the per capita energy demand, keep that more or less flat, something like that and run it again and you see you get even better.

So, the idea is to is to kind of cycle through effectively Steps 1 through 5 and look at the result here. And so, once you've done this and you get to what is the lowest cost then you're going to make a screenshot of this. You're going to talk about the kinds of assumptions or changes to the model that you implemented to give you the lowest per capita cost at the end of it.

Credit: Dutton Institute. Capstone Step 6 Instructions(link is external). YouTube. August 25, 2022.

Step 6 Deliverable

After this step, you should have calculated your best roadmap. Include a copy of the graph on page 13 of the graph pad. This should show the plots from several different versions and should highlight the preferred version. There should be a brief statement summarizing what parts of the model you changed to make the different versions.