A Distinguished Lecture (DL) entitled “Energy Policy- Is it Effective? Is it Fair” was conducted by Mr. Frank Blaskovich, the Vice President of Blaskovich Services in Northern California, US.
Mr Blaskovich focused on energy policy and its importance to stakeholders including energy producers, governments and societies as a system problem. His primary spotlight was on measuring policy effectiveness and fairness. The Lecturer said a policy model had number of drivers that could affect system behaviour. “Even though policy models and physical models are different in many ways, analysis techniques are similar. However, because of deep uncertainties about the future, we use regret analysis to develop policies that minimize losses when bad behaviour occurs."
“We test our policies by re-running the model with resulting policies to see how well they perform. Modifications can be made until policies work better than previous policies. This is a never ending process, because uncertainty about the future will always be with us,” he said.
Mr Blaskovich said: “Our goal is to find policy choices that tend to minimize regret over a wide range of possible, but unknowable futures. This shows typical results from a Regret Analysis and the boundaries of the Policy Envelope created from model runs. Every combination of policy drivers and objectives represents a possible future. For each future, a specific policy generates the best objective result – Minimum State Regret for the State and Minimum Producer Regret for the Producer."
He said there was much more variability in the Fair case production taxes than in the other policies. “A logical question is whether or not the Fair policy is correct? This is a non-intuitive result that often can occur in complex systems. No one, other than a system ‘savant’, could guess the Fair policy without running the model. Complex model results always need constant scrutiny.”
He said it was impossible for one to choose a best policy in a complex system problem the only alternative was to try the best ones. Mr Blaskovich said policymaking was a never-ending process of development, testing and refinement to meet the needs of all of the actors, who were ultimately all members of the society. He described the energy policy problem as a wicked, complex system problem that affected all every day and could only be managed using a system model approach.
“We can only hope for the best, but always plan for the worst,” he said.
Mr Blaskovich asked stakeholders to think more carefully about how energy policy was determined while it was very important and difficult to develop effective and fair policies. “The more people understand this, the better our chances of getting policies that will benefit all of us. I have always thought that the best way to understand a problem is to look at it from another person’s perspective. What policy would you recommend if you are an Energy Producer? If you are a Society member? If you were a State Policy Maker? I suspect that the choice is not the same depending on your perspective. This reinforces the idea that policy making is difficult,” he said.
Maputo Section was his last stop in Africa continent after delivering this lecturer in Tanzania and Ghana where SPE is also present.
In conjunction with this event, Maputo Section held election of the 2017 board. These elections resulted in the indication of the following board members:
Chairperson - Nelson Cossa
Program Chairperson - Francisco Esperança
Membership Chairperson - Imelda Marques
Secretary - Bruno Mate
Treasurer - Fernanda Cossa
Mentor Chairperson - Giuseppe De Rosa