The National Energy Modeling System: A large-scale energy-economic equilibrium model

The National Energy Modeling System (NEMS) is a large-scale mathematical mo del that computes equilibrium fuel prices and quantities in the U.S. energy sector and is currently in use at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). At present, to generate these equilibrium values, NEMS iteratively solves a se quence of linear programs and nonlinear equations. This is a nonlinear Gaus s-Seidel approach to arrive at estimates of market equilibrium fuel prices and quantities. In this paper, we present existence and uniqueness results for NEMS-type models based on a nonlinear complementarity/variational inequ ality problem format. Also, we document mathematically, for the first time, how the inputs and the outputs for each NEMS module link together.