The United Kingdom Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) wishes to appoint a contractor to undertake the maintenance and support for their National Household Model (NHM) to ensure the NHM can be accessed and used effectively by DECC analysts over 2016-19.
The United Kingdom Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) wishes to appoint a contractor to undertake the maintenance and support for their National Household Model (NHM) to ensure the NHM can be accessed and used effectively by DECC analysts over 2016-19.
DECC works to make sure the UK has secure, clean, affordable energy supplies and promote international action to mitigate climate change. In pursuit of this, the Government has committed to statutory Carbon Budgets which must be met to a specific timetable. It is DECC's responsibility to develop and monitor the UK strategy for meeting these budgets. As part of this commitment, there is an extensive range of economic, scientific and social models that are used to analyse the effects of policy interventions across all sectors of the economy.
The primary analytical model for the domestic sector is the National Household Model (NHM) which has been under continuous development and use since February 2014. The current version has the functionality to model DECC's main thermal energy efficiency and fuel poverty policies: Energy Company Obligation (private rented sector extension), Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) and Affordable Warmth. It is anticipated that the application will be extended to incorporate the functionality to model other low carbon and renewable heat policies as and when necessary.
Written primarily in Java with some smaller associated programs written in R, the NHM is open-source and can be downloaded from public Github repositories as specified in the Invitation to Tender. There is a user community within DECC of 10-15 people from the policy and analytical professions who require support in both scenario development and creation of new functionality in response to a changing and challenging policy landscape. The proposed contract covers technical maintenance of the model, testing and integration of third party improvements, user support in terms of scenario coding, documentation and training as well as small-scale development work. The supplier must provide support in a timely manner to allow development of policies to combat climate change and comply with our statutory obligations.
The Department invites tenders from competent organisations to supply the services described in the Invitation to Tender. The final deadline for all applications is 24.6.2016.