Principal Investigator Emre Gencer
Project Website https://sesame.mit.edu/
Project Start Date February 2020
One of the global community’s most significant contemporary challenges is the need to satisfy growing energy demand while simultaneously achieving very significant reductions in the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the production, delivery, and consumption of this energy.
The energy sector is transforming via the convergence of power, transportation, and industrial sectors and inter-sectoral integration. To assess the level of decarbonization achieved through this change, one needs to study the carbon footprint of the energy system as a whole.
Sustainable Energy System Analysis Modelling Environment (SESAME) is a novel, system-scale energy analysis tool to assess the system-level greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of today’s changing energy system.
The underlying analytic tool constitutes more than a thousand individual energy pathways. SESAME, developed as a MATLAB application, provides a consistent platform to estimate life cycle GHG emissions of all stages of the energy sector. Furthermore, the system representation is embedded into the tool for power and transportation sectors.
In the midst of the rapidly evolving energy system, making informed decisions to properly shape this change requires understanding the system and associated trade-offs. All of the presented examples underline that GHG emissions are very sensitive to energy choices and a comprehensive systems-level analysis is essential for making informed decisions.
The SESAME platform is developed to address this pressing need and will continue to evolve to capture the emerging complexities.