Competing Energy Uses for Wood Wastes in British Columbia

One of the many significant impacts of silicon-chip technology is the ability to do detailed engineering-based microeconomic simulations of industrial behavior under variations in input and output prices, tax schemes, and technological choice. If the number of plants in an industry is manageable and each plant can be parameterized by a manageable number of coefficients, each plant's response to such variations can be computed individually. Consistent aggregation produces industry-wide results, together with impacts on output and factor demands. Furthermore, costbenefit analysis of possible new plants or technologies is made far more flexible, as the implications of possible future price or tax environments can be easily computed.