Cameron Farid ’26, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Cameron Farid ’26

Major

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Project Title

Demand-side Energy Modeling for a Net-Zero China

Presentation Link

View Cameron's Presentation

Minor(s): Sustainable Energy

The EnergyPATHWAYS model is a Python-based program that projects the energy demand of an entire economy into the future under different user-defined conditions. Although it was used to model future energy demand for both the United States and Australia in past studies at Princeton University, the use of the model itself was contracted out to developers in those studies. My main objective was to lead the development of in-house capabilities for Princeton to use the model in future Net-Zero studies, notably a Net-Zero China project. This consisted of reverse engineering the model and running iterative tests to understand its inputs and functions. I documented my acquired knowledge in a guide to aid future users and presented my findings on a weekly basis to Chinese colleagues at Tsinghua University to guide development of an EnergyPATHWAYS database for China. The Tsinghua team visited us in person during the last week of my internship, which was a very insightful, fulfilling experience. It was fascinating to see how we could collaborate on a project from across the globe. I look forward to continuing this work in the role of technical support specialist during the upcoming semester.