Veda2.0 Released!


Allocation of Costs and Emissions to End-Uses
#1
This is a general question about processing data outputs from VEDA/TIMES, not specifically a question about VEDA-BE.  I hope that it is appropriate here.

We are hoping to be able to calculate the full life-cycle cost/emissions of end use technologies, whether they are residential applicances or cars and trucks, so this would involve assigning the costs and emissions of upstream processes to the correct downstream processes. 

The challenge is that the cost of "fuels" are determined by a lot of underlying supply technologies and energy resources.  For something like natural gas, which may only have a few processes which may add costs, it is not too challenging, but for many fuels with alot of supply processes representing various infrastructure, there is a challenge in assigning costs to end uses, especially when a fuel has multiple resources, multiple process technologies and multiple end-use technologies that may branch off at different stages. 

I'm wondering if anyone has any insights or systems set up in dealing with these sorts of issues so that we can accurately assign costs to the right end-use technologies (and not only end-use technologies). 

thank you in advance.

Chris
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#2
I think the kind of attribution you are trying to do is already available in the marginal values of fuels. Provided the supply chain has been setup with reasonable costs and you remove the impacts of any taxes/subsidies. In short, levelized cost would capture all endogenous factors and it is already reported, if you activate it on the control panel of case manager.

The real challenge in the life-cycle computations is the part that is *not* explicit in the model. For example, materials that go into technologies. But that becomes messy quite quickly as the materials consumed might already be included in demands and they may also be traded.

I have a question for you: what do you hope to learn from what you are trying to do?


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#3
Hi Amit,
Thank you for the response.

My understanding is that the marginal cost of fuels (expressed by the EQ_CombalM) is the shadow price of that commodity, the change in the objective function with a change in that commodity.  If that is the case, then is it not the case that when we run the model with a very stringent carbon cap the "cost" that is reported by VEDA for this fuel may not be reflective of all the costs required to utilize the fuel, but can also include other costs associated with making sure that the carbon cap is still met (i.e. perhaps investment in some other technologies to reduce emissions that result from using additional amounts of the fuel in question). 

The goal of this analysis is that I would like to calculate the cost of emissions reductions on a technology by technology basis.  And I would like to do so on an average or total basis and not on a marginal basis.  When I say this I mean that I would like to calculate the total cost of supplying all of the fuel used by an end-use technology (not the marginal cost x the quantity of fuel) and allocate it to the correct end use. 

For example, to calculate the cost of emissions reductions for electric cars generally, I would like to know the average cost of electricity, which involves all of the technology costs, but also knowing all of the average costs of all the fuel inputs into the power plants as well (which in our model are comprised of extraction, transport and other processes which all add costs to the underlying primary energy resource).  It's a very complex network of processes, and I was hoping that someone here might have already done this sort of analysis and set up systems to manage the data and would have some hints or suggestions about how to do this efficiently.  I'm trying to do it in excel with tables exported from VEDA-BE and I'm getting bogged down in the enormity of the task.

REgarding your other suggestion about Levelized Cost, that could be helpful, but I don't see it in my control panel.  Can you tell me exactly what I should be activating on my control panel? 

thank you for your help

Chris

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#4
these details are useful. But my questions was slightly different - what do you really want to achieve by allocating things? And do you want to allocate to end-uses or end-use technologies?
Major updates will be released for BE and FE in the next days. You will have lev cost reporting feature after that.
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#5
Hi Amit,

I'm not entirely sure if I'm getting your question but I'll try to answer:

We would like to determine the cost (and emissions) of providing specific end-uses and for each end-use technology.  Thus, we can determine the average cost of providing a unit of light-duty VMT but also the cost for each technology that is used to meet that energy service and see how they cost differs under different scenarios (climate constraints, changes in oil prices, policy cases like fuel economy standards or fuel carbon standards).  The ultimate goal is to compare the costs of meeting service demands in our reference case with those in our policy scenarios and point to specific technologies that lead to different emissions and cost outcomes.

Is there a webpage that describes the various updates for BE and FE and where we can go to see if we have the latest version?

thanks,

Chris
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#6
(09-01-2014, 09:38 PM)AKanudia Wrote: I think the kind of attribution you are trying to do is already available in the marginal values of fuels. Provided the supply chain has been setup with reasonable costs and you remove the impacts of any taxes/subsidies. In short, levelized cost would capture all endogenous factors and it is already reported, if you activate it on the control panel of case manager.

The real challenge in the life-cycle computations is the part that is *not* explicit in the model. For example, materials that go into technologies. But that becomes messy quite quickly as the materials consumed might already be included in demands and they may also be traded.


I have a question for you: what do you hope to learn from what you are trying to do?



Dear Amit,
I have similar issue as Chris. I have model structure like in TIMES-PanEU, i.e. electricity generated on several levels, also in residential and commercial sector and the electricity is divided into more commodities according to sectors.
I would like to calculate one LCOE for electricity as a commodity (I should be a weighted average I think). If I understand it correctly, Var_NcapR is related to a single process.
 
Is there a way how to construct LCOE for such a general commodity composed from more commodities across sectors and processes?
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