Irene Okioga 11/18/2015

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Hello,

I wanted to understand if LEAP could be used for a study I am currently doing. I want to calculate the least cost expansion for onsite renewable energy generation at wastewater treatment plants around within a City in the USA, based on the energy content in wastewater (hydraulic energy due to flow and head, thermal due to raised temperature of wastewater and chemical energy based on digestion for biogas). The aim is that the wastewater treatment plants are able to be NetZero in energy consumption. Could LEAP be useful for this analysis? So far based on the tutorials it seems that LEAP was created for a larger geographic area.

Please advise,

Thanks,
IO

Taylor Binnington 11/20/2015
 

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Hi Irene,

Thanks for your question. You're correct that typically LEAP is used for modeling larger spatial scales (i.e. countries or regions), but lately I believe there are some applications in cities. It can be appropriate on any spatial scale, but is really intended to model a complete energy system. This covers the production and consumption of all fuels used in a system.

As such, I suspect it is more fully-featured than is needed for your analysis. Still, I would still suggest you try the first exercise in our online training materials to get a feel for its capabilities:

http://www.energycommunity.org/default.asp?action=42

LEAP does permit you to find least-cost capacity expansion and dispatch, with some limitations. You may also find it useful to work through exercise 6 of the training materials, mentioned above. Are you interested in the least-cost mix of hydraulic, thermal and chemical electricity production for a specified level of demand? In this case it would be possible to treat each as a separate process ("power plant"), and allow LEAP to construct and dispatch each in an optimal way.

Hope this helps,
Taylor