Welcome to SEI’s U.S. Center

The Stockholm Environment Institute is an international not-for-profit research organization that has been engaged in environment and development issues at local, national, regional and global policy levels for 25 years.

Our goal is to bring about change for sustainable development by bridging science and policy. We do this by conducting integrated analysis that supports decision-makers.

SEI's work is interdisciplinary in nature, drawing upon engineering, economics, ecology, ethics, operations research, international relations and software design.

We work all around the world building capacity for integrated sustainability planning through training and collaboration on projects.

SEI's U.S. Center is a research affiliate of Tufts University in Massachusetts and also has offices in Davis, California, and Seattle, Washington.

SEMINAR

Low Emissions Development in an Era of Cheap and Abundant Fossil Fuels

How can we support development in ways that protect the planet from climate change in a future likely to be dominated by cheap and abundant supplies of fossil fuels?

This seminar, held Oct. 7 at Tufts University, focused on fuel lock-in risks, the implications for equity and poverty alleviation of asking countries to forgo fossil fuel development, and the emerging field of Low Emissions Development Strategies (LEDS), in which SEI is playing an active and high-profile role.

Download the presentations

Michael Lazarus: Reconciling fossil fuel development and climate change mitigation (PDF, 2.4MB)

Charlie Heaps: Reconciling fossil fuel development and climate change mitigation (PDF, 1.1MB)

Ujjant Chakravorty: Energy and poverty (PDF, 1.1MB)

Sivan Kartha: Equity and low-emission development (PDF, 1.4MB)

See our Storify feature on the seminar (with visuals)

SEI's climate and energy modeling system

LEAP 2014: faster, more powerful, and built for interaction

The newest version of SEI's Long-range Energy Alternatives Planning system includes a scenario explorer, enhanced graphics, a simpler interface, and multiple performance improvements.

LEAP is a powerful, versatile software tool for integrated energy planning and climate change mitigation assessment developed by SEI's U.S. Center, and distributed at no charge to academic, nonprofit and government organizations in the developing world and to students worldwide. In the last year alone, more than 2,000 people actively used the tool, and the LEAP online community has now grown to over 22,000 members in 191 countries.

LEAP can be used at a wide range of scales, from cities and states to national, regional and even global applications. It is fast becoming the de facto standard for countries undertaking integrated resource planning and GHG mitigation assessments, especially in the developing world, and for creating Low Emission Development Strategies (LEDS).

The newest version, LEAP 2014, released on June 6, makes it easier to share and discuss modelling results with non-technical audiences, with improved charts and results tables, and a new Scenario Explorer (see figure).

With the new Scenario Explorer, you can explore the implications of different policy choices, using slider bars that are connected to key parameters in the underlying LEAP data set. As you pull on these sliders, results are immediately recalculated and shown in overview charts. The tool can also be used to quickly switch on and off specific measures within an overall scenario, such as energy efficiency, fuel switching, renewables, or reducing process emissions, to decide which overall strategy is best in terms of overall costs, emissions reduction potential, energy security or how the measures contribute to key national development objectives. This, combined with dramatic speed improvements and a new Full Screen View, makes LEAP even more useful for use in interactive settings such as LEDS stakeholder workshops.

Other key new features include:

Improved optimization: LEAP now provides "industrial strength" optimization capabilities by working seamlessly with IBM's CPLEX solver for increased speed and the ability to handle larger data sets.
Improved costing: Cost-benefit analysis has been improved and made more flexible with the new ability to model stranded costs (i.e. debt payments) on pre-existing capacity, and a new LoanPayment function to calculate remaining annualized costs.
Tags: We have improved LEAP's organization skills. You can now use color-coded tags to classify technologies that belong to more than one category; for example, power plants could be tagged as thermal, renewable or nuclear technologies, or as pre-existing or new types of power plants.
New 'Create Branches from Excel' wizard: Much of the data required for energy and climate planning is available in tabular form in spreadsheets. A new wizard lets you create the technology data in your LEAP models by directly importing from these spreadsheet tables, reducing tedious data entry tasks and automatically converting data into consistent measurement units.
Simplified and more robust user interface: Operation of LEAP is now simpler and more consistent across different views, with new one-click options and several interface refinements, especially to auto-complete features that help users write their model expressions. Charts and tables have been upgraded making them more beautiful and easier to interpret, and directly usable in your reports.
Thoroughly updated help: LEAP's help files reflect all the changes in LEAP 2014, with improved formatting and additional pages devoted to describing important concepts such as capacity expansion planning and the new Scenario Explorer and Tags features.

The new version is fully backwards compatible with previous versions. Older data sets will be automatically upgraded when opened in the new version. LEAP also creates backups of previous versions for safety.

Learn more about LEAP2014 »

News

Q&A: Jason Veysey on low-carbon strategies for Latin America

May 30, 2014
Veysey, J.
SEI is a partner in CLIMACAP, an EU-funded project that is helping four of the region's largest economies to enhance their energy and emissions modelling for better climate and development policies. SEI is using LEAP in collaboration with seven Latin American and European institutions, building national and international models for Latin America and enhancing modelling capacity in the region. The work is funded by the European Commission. Follow the link below to read a Q&A with Jason Veysey, a senior scientist at SEI-US who is leading the national modeling work.
External link

Two workshops in Asia to focus on using LEAP for GHG mitigation assessment

February 21, 2014
Heaps, C.
The U.S. Agency for International Development Low Emissions Asian Development (USAID LEAD) program, in collaboration with the USAID Indonesia Clean Energy Development (USAID ICED) program and the Asian Greenhouse Gas Management Center (AGMC), will host two regional events in March 2014 on using LEAP for greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation assessment. The first, "Using LEAP for GHG mitigation at the sub-national scale", will take place from March 25-28, 2014, in Indonesia. The second, "Strengthening the Asian community of practice on LEAP", will be held in Bangkok, Thailand, from March 31 to April 2.
External link

Keystone XL's biggest GHG impact could be effect on global oil consumption

December 19, 2013
Erickson, P. , Lazarus, M.
An SEI-US analysis identifies a major gap in existing estimates of Keystone XL's potential emissions impact: they appear to pay little attention to the pipeline's effect on the global oil supply, prices and resulting demand. To the extent that Keystone XL enables significantly greater development of Canadian oil sands, the analysis finds, the pipeline's greatest impact on GHG emissions could be its effect on global oil prices and, in turn, consumption.
More Information

SEI launches research on the new fossil fuel economy

September 27, 2013
Erickson, P. , Lazarus, M.
SEI recently launched a project that aims to deepen understanding of the risks posed by new investments in fossil fuel infrastructure, and of the possible policy responses. The project's first discussion brief reviews methods used to analyze the incremental greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions impact of fossil fuel infrastructure projects, such as the Keystone XL oil pipeline or coal export terminals in the U.S. How should the emissions impact be assessed? It's a critically important question, yet as our research shows, it defies an easy answer. Other discussion briefs will touch on, among other topics, accounting for the GHG emissions associated with fossil fuel extraction, and the equity implications of one of the necessary steps in limiting climate change: leaving most of the remaining fossil fuel reserves in the ground.
More Information