Energy forecasting

A selective and critical review of the state of the art in Energy Forecasting as perceived in assessing future interactions between fuel and feedstock availability for the chemical industry. Models are required of Energy supply and demand and their interaction through the energy market which is subject to national and international policies and conflict and to environmental restrictions and legislation. Significant advances have been made in modelling supply but neither an economic nor a technological approach alone is adequate for modelling demand. In particular there is lack of an adequate model of the industrial sector that reflects the diversity of the production function and adequately incorporates the relationship between technological change, capital investment and energy usage. In the UK the structure of industrial models is over constrained by the aggregation-structure of the national energy statistics. The economic and political forces required to bring about major changes in the capital infra structure are often ignored. There is need to establish logical lower practical limits to energy usage, to develop a system logic structure that provides transfer parameters between various levels and type of aggregation, to develop models which allow probability distributing of variables to be included and to model more effectively the interactions across the boundaries of economics, social and political science, physics, chemistry and mathematics.