Simulation of incentive mechanisms for renewable energy policies

Designing sustainable energy policies has a strong impact on economy, society and environment. Beside a planning activity, policy makers are called to design a number of implementation instruments to enforce their plans. They encompass subsidies, fiscal incentives, feed in tariffs to name a few. Understanding the impact of these instruments on the energy market is essential to select the most efficient one. We propose in this paper a multi-agent simulator that mimics the adoption of photovoltaic as a consequence of a number of implementation instruments. The simulator mainly considers economic evaluations in the agent decision-making procedure, but we are aware also social aspects play an important role and they are subject of current research.