any way to set lower AF for 1st time period?

[cyang]

Hi,

I'm looking to see if there is a way to lower the AF parameter for processes in the 1st time period that they are built.  I.e. if you were to build a power plant, the normal operating AF might be 80% but in the first time period, because of construction and other startup factors, the AF might only be 50%.  This would be linked to the first year that they are built, and not the first year that they are available. 

thanks,

Chris

[Antti-L]

Yes, there is a way for doing that.

TIMES supports age-dependent AF factors.  First define the SHAPE parameter (the relative level of the availability, by the age of the plant).  Then define NCAP_AFX for the process, which specifies the shape index to be used, and you are done. The actual availability factor at age N will be the NCAP_AF multiplied by the SHAPE index for the age N.

You don't even need to define the process vintaged in order to use this feature, because the availability factors are capacity-related attributes (the VAR_NCAP variables are always vintaged in TIMES).

[EDIT:] After taking a quick look at the documentation, it seems that the documentation fails to mention the important fact that the shape index 1 is reserved for a constant shape of 1. So, it might be useful to note that the range of the available shape indexes for the user to define is from 2 to 100.

[cyang]

Hi Antti,

Thanks for the reply.  I'm glad to hear that that age dependent AF factors exist.  I've looked through the VEDA documentation but do not see where/how to define the SHAPE parameter.  Can you explain to me how to do this?

Once I've specified this SHAPE function, it looks like that for a given process in the process description, I just make a column for NCAP_AFX, which specifies the shape that I'm interested in.  If I have only one SHAPE function, NCAP_AFX would simply be 2 for each relevant process?

thanks!

Chris

[Antti-L]

See if the following example (related to the DEMO model) helps.



You don't need to define any interpolation option for SHAPE; it is always inter-/extrapolated.
But for NCAP_AFX, the default option is 10, and so you might want to use some other option (e.g. 5 as in the example).

[cyang]

Thank you Antti, your example was very helpful for me to figure out how to incorporate this feature into my model.  I think it is working well and I greatly appreciate your help.

Chris