www.enreport.com

A very interesting page for general energy models. You can download and use them for policy analysis. Check the elibrary for useful papers.

Check:

http://www.millennium-institute.org/resources/elibrary/index.html#models

If you are making forecasts, new and timely statistics are extremely important. You will also know that generally, new data come up with a lag. For example in Turkey it takes not less than 2 months for us to see crucial data. This recent article at Google Research will probably help us, all.
The paper by Varian and Choi can be downloaded from here. The mechanism is clever yet simple: use the normalized searched volumes from Google Insight to correlate with the real data like house sales, cars and etc.
Although I use some other data for Turkey, let me show you the effect of recent tax break on auto.

The tax break has been revealed on 16th March 2009 and the search volume is given above (keyword:oto, region: Turkey). The effect is close to %67. According to this article, the actual sale figures raise by 100%.

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/04/predicting-present-with-google-trends.html
http://google.com/googleblogs/pdfs/google_predicting_the_present.pdf
http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/ekonomi/11470037.asp

World Energy Projection system is an old model that Department of Energy, US once used for some of their projections. It looks like more of an accountant's balance sheets, but you can download and check the validity of the model for fun, it will be a good exercise.

Model can be downloaded from here and documentation is here. In the document you can find the relevant informations about using the files.

"The World Energy Projection System (WEPS) was developed by the Office of Integrated Analysis and Forecasting within the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the independent statistical and analytical agency of the U.S. Department of Energy. WEPS is an integrated set of personal computer-based spreadsheets containing data compilations, assumption specifications, descriptive analysis procedures, and projection models. The WEPS accounting framework incorporates projections from independently documented models and assumptions about the future energy intensity of economic activity (ratios of total energy consumption divided by gross domestic product [GDP]), and about the rate of incremental energy requirements met by natural gas, coal, and renewable energy sources (hydroelectricity, geothermal, solar, wind, biomass, and other renewable resources). Projections produced by WEPS are published in the annual report, International Energy Outlook."

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/weps/
Doc: http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/FTPROOT/modeldoc/m05097.pdf

If you are one those experts that do not submit yourself to international climate change groups and have enough knowledge to built your own scenarious, there is tool that can help you.
It is free of charge, just press download in the following site, and submit the form, then you will be directed to a page to download one big chunk of model and files. (Size: 160 MB). The name of the program is Magicc/Scengen. It does all sorts of things. Web page is at the end of this post.
The following information is from the website:

"MAGICC consists of a suite of coupled gas-cycle, climate and ice-melt models integrated into a single software package. The software allows the user to determine changes in greenhouse-gas concentrations, global-mean surface air temperature, and sea level resulting from anthropogenic emissions"



MAGICC/SCENGEN Overview:
MAGICC and SCENGEN are coupled, user-friendly interactive software suites that allow users to investigate future climate change and its uncertainties at both the global-mean and regional levels. MAGICC carries through calculations at the global-mean level using the same upwelling-diffusion, energy-balance climate model that has been and is employed by IPCC. SCENGEN uses these results, together with spatially detailed results from the CMIP3/AR4 archive of AOGCMs, to produce spatially detailed information on future changes in temperature, precipitation and MSLP, changes in their variability, and a range of other statistics.
In running MAGICC/SCENGEN, the user can intervene in the design of the global or regional climate change scenario in the following ways:
By selecting and/or specifying the greenhouse gas and sulfur dioxide emissions scenarios.
By defining the values for a limited set of climate model parameters in MAGICC that are important in determining the effects of uncertainties in the carbon cycle, the magnitude of aerosol forcing, the overall sensitivity of the climate system to external forcing, and ocean mixing rate.
By specifying the future time period for which results are displayed (out to 2400).
By specifying the AOGCMs that are averaged to produce the climate change pattern information.
By selecting an area or region for spatial averaging of climate change results.
This version of MAGICC/SCENGEN was developed primarily with funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, but it rests on developments carried out over the past 20 years that were funded by a number of organizations.

Download from here: