FLO_EMIS with IRE process problem

[pedodds]

Dear Amit,

I'm escalating this issue with you on the advice of Antti, who has already looked at it at: http://iea-etsap.org/forum/showthread.php?tid=56.

In short, I'm defining an ENVACT emission for an IRE process and it looks as if VEDA-FE is defining it as a trade flow rather than an auxiliary flow in TIMES, which means that the emissions are sometimes not proportional to the commodity flow.  See the post above for Antti's explanation.

I'd be grateful if you could check this out.

Thanks and best wishes,

Paul

[AKanudia]

Apologies; I was not listening closely enough on the ETSAP forum.

ENVACT is MARKAL legacy. VEDA supports some of these attributes so that some of the indexes that TIMES needs can be guessed in the simple cases.

In this case, I suggest you use the TIMES attribute IRE_FLOSUM directly. For example, replace ENVACT~CO2TOT with IRE_FLOSUM~CO2TOT and add IMP~OUT~OILCRD in a new column (Other_Indexes) for process IMPOILCRD.

Similarly, IRE_FLOSUM~CO2TOT and EXP~IN~COA for EXPCOA.

Let me know if this works.

[Antti-L]

Isn't ENVACT an alias for FLO_EMIS on activity? One should be able to use FLO_EMIS on activity for IRE processes. If it doesn't work, I'll file a bug report! 

[Antti-L]

Phew!  I just tested it, and defining FLO_EMIS on activity appears to work correctly, but when trying to use the alias ENV_ACT instead, VEDA-FE creates trade flows for the emissions!

I am very glad that the TIMES parameter works, but I fail to understand why the alias does not work correctly.

[AKanudia]

I agree. I have only proposed a feasible solution; optimization remains.

[pedodds]

Dear Antti and Amit,

I've tested both methods (IRE_FLOSUM and FLO_EMIS) and both work correctly.

I think this is a minor bug that needs addressing at some point in VEDA - when looking at the Process Master, using either ENVACT or FLO_EMIS give exactly the same data but they produce different TIMES set definitions.  This is both confusing and difficult to spot, as the model appears to working correctly.  So perhaps it could be addressed in a future release?

Note that using ENVACT for the MIN set instead of FLO_EMIS produces similar discrepancies in the BASE.DD file, with unwanted CO2TOT definitions added to the TOP and TOP_IRE topologies.

Thanks a lot for your help!

Paul

[AKanudia]

Paul, can you tell me which version are you using? The version I am about to release already handles both ENVACT and FLO_EMIS correctly. 

[pedodds]

I'm using VEDA-FE v4.3.63 and TIMES v3.4.3.

You can see the differences in outputs by comparing these two files: uploads/225/envact_issue.zip

Paul