VEDA-FE - having commodity group as a valid input for NCAP_AFC?

[vangelis]

Dear Amit,

According to TIMES documentation, if a storage (or trade) process have the same commodity as input and output, then the user has the possibility to specify different commodity availability factors for each flow via the NCAP_AFC/NCAP_AFS parameters, by  defining an NCAP_AFC/NCAP_AFCS both for the commodity type and for the single commodity itself. Then the commodity availability being applied to the output flow while the group availability is applied to the input flow.


This implies that if I have a storage process stgproc, with input/ouput commodity elec of type nrg, I can specify a commodity availability for the input elec and output elec as follows:  

NCAP_AFC('reg','2010','stgproc','elec','DAYNITE'=0.8; // this is for the output commodity elec
NCAP_AFC('reg','2010','stgproc','nrg','DAYNITE'=0.8; // this is for the input commodity elec

But when I give the commodity group (NRG in this case, since I don't specify a user-defined one), then the VEDA-FE ignores the commodity group value and does not write it in the corresponding  DD file.  When I manually insert the above two rows in the .dd file , then i get the expected behaviour in TIMES as it is written in the documentation. 

I would greatly appreciate any help on how to define NCAP_AFC both for a single commodity and the commodity group in a VEDA-FE base (or subres) file. 

Best regards, 
Vangelis

[vangelis]

Dear Amit,

In addition to my previous e-mail, it seems that the parameter NCAP_AFCS is missing from the VEDA-FE template database. I am using VEDA-FE version 4.5.3 build 20.Juli.2016.

Many thanks,
Vangelis

[Antti-L]

Dear Vangelis,

Although this is a dirty work-around, you could define NRG also as a commodity (use Lim_type N) in VEDA-FE, as long as you make sure that you are NOT using it in the RES topology. After doing that you should be able to use it for NCAP_AFC in VEDA-FE.  But it would of course be better if VEDA-FE would support commodity groups in NCAP_AFC.

Unless I am mistaken, NCAP_AFCS is not needed in VEDA-FE, because VEDA accepts both timeslices and timeslice levels for NCAP_AFC. 
NCAP_AFCS was introduced mainly in view of ANSWER-TIMES, which cannot accept both for the same parameter dimension.

[vangelis]

Dear Antti,

Thank you very much for the nice tip of defining NRG as commodity, it works very well !

I also remembered now from your answer that indeed VEDA-FE accepts for the NCAP_AFC parameter both timeslices and timeslice levels. And that you did this extension after a request I made to you 2 years ago (http://iea-etsap.org/forum/showthread.php?tid=68)!! Thus, the NCAP_AFCS is not needed for VEDA-TIMES users, but I got confused because I saw it in the documentation but not in the front-end (and then I thought that something changed).

Many thanks,
Vangelis