Choosing technologies in TIMES

[saleh]

I wanted to calculate how TIMES choose between different technologies in each year (out of the model in my spread sheet), I wonder if I should do that using NPV or levelized cost. do you have any idea that how should I calculate levelized cost for this purpose?

[Antti-L]

It would be a very tedious and complex task to calculate in a spreadsheet how TIMES chooses between different technologies. That's the whole point of using the TIMES code and optimizing solvers instead.

A levelized cost calculation (see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_energy_cost) may give a certain indication as to the comparative position of technologies, but in the model there may be also many other factors affecting the choices among technologies, for example, various constraints influencing technology deployment, the variation of prices in different timelices (baseload vs. peak generation), and the assumed contribution of technologies during the peak load. Therefore, any external calculation, such as levelized costs, which does not take into account all aspects of the model, cannot tell you how TIMES chooses between different technologies.