LEAP: The Long-range Energy Alternatives Planning system

Event details

Speaker(s): Dr Charlie Heaps, SEI-US

Charlie is a senior scientist  at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) where he has been working for almost 30 years as the lead developer of a software tool, called LEAP: The Long-range Energy Planning Alternatives system. Charlie is based in SEI’s U.S. Center at Tufts University in Massachusetts, and works closely with colleagues at SEI’s York Center. 

LEAP has become one of the leading analytical tools used by countries designing strategies that address the challenges of improving energy efficiency, abating greenhouse gas emissions, and combatting air pollution.  It has also been widely applied in academia with scores of publications written every year describing LEAP-based studies.  LEAP is particularly focused on the needs of developing countries, where energy use and emissions are growing most rapidly and where the institutional capacity to take action on climate and air pollution are in shortest supply.  For this reason, LEAP has always tried to make the complex science of integrated planning as approachable and transparent as possible.  In this talk, Charlie will briefly introduce LEAP, talk about some of the key challenges involved in designing and applying such tools for integrated planning, and mention some of the new capabilities that will be coming in the next major release of the tool.