UC for Flex Fuel Processes

[lppnog]

I need to come up with an absolute UC for a flex fuel vehicles in order to estipulate a minimum amount of pkm to be produced by using ethanol and a minimum amount of pkm to be produced by using gasoline as input. I´ve tried the structure below, but it seems not to distingish the inputs, and one UC overwrite the other.

UC_N

Pset_Set

Pset_PN

Pset_CI

Pset_CO

Cset_CN

Attribute

Year

LimType

UC_CAP

UC_NCAP

UC_ACT

UC_RHSRTS

UC_RHSRTS~0

UC_Desc

UC_VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX_G

VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX*

GASOLINE

GASOLINE

2008

LO

1

3000000

UC_VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX_G

VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX*

GASOLINE

GASOLINE

2009

LO

1

3000000

UC_VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX_G

VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX*

GASOLINE

GASOLINE

2013

LO

1

9000000

UC_VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX_G

VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX*

GASOLINE

GASOLINE

2018

LO

1

20000000

UC_VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX_G

VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX*

GASOLINE

GASOLINE

2023

LO

1

40000000

UC_VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX_G

VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX*

GASOLINE

GASOLINE

2028

LO

1

50000000

UC_VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX_G

VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX*

GASOLINE

GASOLINE

2033

LO

1

60000000

UC_VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX_G

VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX*

GASOLINE

GASOLINE

2038

LO

1

70000000

UC_VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX_G

VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX*

GASOLINE

GASOLINE

2043

LO

1

70000000

UC_VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX_G

VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX*

GASOLINE

GASOLINE

2048

LO

1

80000000

UC_VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX_G

VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX*

GASOLINE

GASOLINE

2053

LO

1

90000000

UC_VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX_E

VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX*

ETHANOL

ETHANOL

2008

LO

1

70000000

UC_VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX_E

VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX*

ETHANOL

ETHANOL

2009

LO

1

70000000

UC_VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX_E

VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX*

ETHANOL

ETHANOL

2013

LO

1

90000000

UC_VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX_E

VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX*

ETHANOL

ETHANOL

2018

LO

1

10000000

UC_VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX_E

VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX*

ETHANOL

ETHANOL

2023

LO

1

10000000

UC_VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX_E

VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX*

ETHANOL

ETHANOL

2028

LO

1

2000000

UC_VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX_E

VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX*

ETHANOL

ETHANOL

2033

LO

1

2000000

UC_VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX_E

VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX*

ETHANOL

ETHANOL

2038

LO

1

2000000

UC_VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX_E

VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX*

ETHANOL

ETHANOL

2043

LO

1

2000000

UC_VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX_E

VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX*

ETHANOL

ETHANOL

2048

LO

1

2000000

UC_VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX_E

VEHICLE_ICE_FLEX*

ETHANOL

ETHANOL

2053

LO

1

2000000

Would anyone know how to solve thos problem? Thank you very much!

Regards,

[Antti-L]

Good question, but I am afraid that there may not be any satisfactory solution.

If I understand correctly, you would like to set a lower bound on the pkm produced by multi-fuel vehicles, separately for each input fuel used. However, as there is only one activity variable per timeslice and period (and per vintage, if vintaged), one cannot distinguish the pkm produced by different fuels by referring to the activity variable (VAR_ACT). For such technologies, usually the only way to refer to the pkm produced by different input fuels would be to multiply the flow of each fuel (VAR_FLO) first by the vehicle efficiency (e.g. vkm/GJ) and then by the passenger load efficiency (pkm/vkm).

Although doing it in that way might look feasible as such, there are several caveats:

1)     You would need to utilize the (possibly scenario-dependent) efficiency data in in order to define all the UC_FLO coefficients for the VAR_FLO variables for each individual flex-fuel technology.

2)     Because the technologies in general have different efficiencies, one would not be able to make much use of process filters.

3)     Even if the conditions 1) and 2) above might appear barely acceptable, you would still not be able define the efficiencies accurately for vintaged technologies, because the TIMES user constraints do not support any mechanism for referring to the flow variables by vintage, only to the sum of flows in all vintages by period.

In principle, think that it would be possible to implement in TIMES an option for automatically multiplying the VAR_FLO variables by certain efficiency parameters in user constraints. But at least currently there is no such option available.

Consequently, as far as I can see, the only way to model such user constraints is to multiply all the VAR_FLO variables manually by the efficiency coefficients mentioned above, bearing in mind that this approach works correctly only in the case of non-vintaged technologies.

[lppnog]

Hi,

thank you very much for your help. It helped to understand better the issue, athough i went for a simpler approach, even though it was not exactly what i was looking for: i defined minimum share constraints far the process bases in each input. It seems to do the trick up o now...