COST_FLO

[dvanre]

What is included in cost_flo, are the fuel/energy (input of a process) cost included; I have a process consuming electricity and in a scenario the price of electricity doubles and the input is the same and cost_flo does not change either which I find strange; I cannot find it in the report writer files.

[AKanudia]

Antti can give a more authoritative and comprehensive answer, but Cost_Flo only includes commodity-specific flow costs, like FLO_COST/FLO_DELIV. And based on the description of this attribute, I think IRE_PRICE is also included. In any case, all exogenously specified costs.

As far as I know, marginals are used only for Cost_IRE.

[Antti-L]

Amit's answer was quite correct: Cost_Flo includes only the flow costs, according to what has been specified by FLO_COST, FLO_DELIV and IRE_PRICE.

Basically all the reporting attributes for the annual costs (Cost_xxx) are based on the actual costs, and not on the marginals. The only exception is the Cost_Ire attribute, which reports the "implied trade costs" for the endogenous trade flows, based on the marginals of the trade equations (positive for the importers and negative for the exporters). The sum of the Cost_Ire costs over all regions is thus zero. And you can get the total annual energy system costs by summing up all the Cost_xxx attributes (excluding the salvage values Cost_Salv).

[dvanre]

Thank you for your answers. It might be interesting to also have the cost flo computed on the marginals; We can compute it when going to the RES but it could be useful to have it when making a cost table for a process

[Antti-L]

Do you mean that you would like to have the products of (EQ_CombalM(r,t,c,s) * FLOW(r,v,t,p,c,s)) reported by TIMES?  If so, note that you can do that very easily in both Excel and Access:  It is a simple multiplication operation. For example, in Access you could do this with a very simple and fast bulk Query operation. 

Therefore, I think providing a reporting attribute for this would, in fact, be redundant, and would only make the VEDA-BE databases larger without providing any additional information (because all the necessary information is already there).

However, if you still would like to have these products reported by TIMES, I can of course add such an option for you. If you would like that, could you please confirm the exact formula(s) for calculating these "value flows"?  I guess annual values would be sufficient, and so maybe the following simple formula could be sufficient:

Code:

Value_Flo(r,v,t,p,c) = Sum(s, EQ_CombalM(r,t,c,s) * FLOW(r,v,t,p,c,s))

Or would you perhaps additionally wish the sign be positive for inputs and negative for outputs?

[wnijs]

Dear Antti,

I had a talk with Denise on this issue and I share the idea to have the option included. One of the reasons is that the commodity balance is the most important in understanding the "price based" objective function (since demands are also commodities). For many processes is it a good check to see how large the mulitplication is.

It is a good suggestion to make an option so that it can only be used during checking a model.

Your formula looks perfect, also the suggestion to have outputs negative.

[Antti-L]

Very well, it seems that you consider doing the multiplication in Excel too difficult?

I will include a new option for having these products reported in next release.

[wnijs]

I believe that it can be helpful for the other ETSAP members too, so thanks !

Wouter