A Spatially Explicit Agent-Based Model of the Diffusion of Green Electricity: Model Setup and Retrodictive Validation.

The purpose of this chapter is to propose and illustrate a validation procedure for a spatially explicit ABM of the diffusion of green electricity tariffs in the German electricity market. We focus on two notions of model validity: We report on structural validity by describing the model setup and its empirical and theoretical grounding. Then we challenge simulation results with a rich spatially explicit historical customer data set thus focusing on retrodictive validity. In particular the latter validation exercise can be prototypic for the class of spatially explicit diffusion ABMs in data-rich domains because it systematically scrutinises validity on different levels of agent aggregation.