Martin Andersson 2/4/2015

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Hello,

I want to add in my transformation/process-branch an CHP-plant with waste as a fuel. How should I deal with the fuel costs, which are negative in this case, when LEAP doesn��t allow negative fuel costs?

The same problem occur when I want to ad electricity certificate for Wind Power that doesn't have any variable OM costs but receives an income from these certificates.

Thanks in advance.

Best regards
Martin

Taylor Binnington 2/5/2015
 

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Hi Martin,

That's a good question. You are correct that the Fuel Cost variable (assigned to a Transformation process' feedstock fuel) does not permit negative costs, and neither does the process' Variable O+M cost. However, under the Resources branches you can enter negative Indigenous Cost and Import Cost. These costs are added to (or subtracted from!) the total societal cost when you view the Costs: Social Costs of your entire LEAP area, but the trade-off is that they will not appear when you view Transformation: Module Cost Balance for your electricity generation module.

After thinking about it, what may work for you is to reduce the Indigenous and/or Import Cost of your solid waste fuel by an amount equal to (subsidy per unit of energy produced) * (efficiency of waste or wind plant). This means for every unit of subsidy accumulated by the output of the plant, a lesser subsidy is instead allocated to its feedstock fuel.

An important detail - unless the wind or solid waste plant is the only branch in your model where wind or solid waste are consumed, you will need to define a new fuel in LEAP's fuel's database that will have the subsidy allocated to it. You may choose to call this "Subsidized Wind" (etc), which is consumed only by the wind plants you wish to subsidize. This help page will help you to add fuels, if this ends up being necessary:

http://www.energycommunity.org/WebHelpPro/Supporting_Screens/Fuels.htm

Do you intend to use LEAP's supply-side optimization capabilities? If so, this solution will not work for you - please let me know, and maybe I can suggest something else!

Best,

Taylor