jrissman
commented
1 year ago Policy levers in the EPS are limited to two subscripts. One way to arrange the policy levers would be:
-
Industrial electrification by end use (subscripted by industry and by end use, omitting the medium- and high-temp non-boiler end uses, since those would be covered by the other lever)
-
Industrial fuel shifting for med- and high-temp, non-boiler process heating (subscripted by industry and by new fuel type, electricity or hydrogen). The user setting gets applied to both medium- and high-temp processes. I don't think we need to break this out into two levers by temperature range, because we can use the "industry" lever to make these relevant distinctions. For instance, we could use more hydrogen in the "iron and steel" industry reflecting H2-DRI. For most industries, there is no sharp line between the ability or technologies to electrify medium- and high-heat processes anyway, so there is no real basis for splitting the lever up in this way, and it would be better from a user experience perspective as well.
We currently have two levers for industrial fuel shifting/electrification, so this would actually be the same number of levers, but with expanded subscript breakouts for lever 1 above, and different cost and energy data backing them up.
mkmahajan
From Jeff's 4/13/23 email:
I think you’re right, I think it does make sense to have industrial fuel shifting broken out more, and not just by temperature range. We could the industrial temperature subscript to “Industrial End Use” and expand the subscript to have these elements:
Then, we expand (and rename) IHDbT to not just apportion energy use into temperature bands, but to apportion energy use into the buckets noted above. We would need two .csv files for this input variable, one for electricity and one for combustible fuels, since the apportionment of electricity into the buckets above is very different from the way combustible fuels are apportioned, according to MECS.
If we did that, we could treat each end use differently, depending on which technologies would be involved in electrifying that end use (or shifting it to green hydrogen). For instance, shifting fossil-based “machine drive” to electricity would invoke the costs and efficiency of electric motors, rather than electrified heating equipment, as I believe we have it today. This will improve accuracy of energy use and financial outputs.
Note that we’re not including the non-process uses in the industry sector, because they should already be covered in the buildings sector, in commercial buildings (HVAC, water heating, lighting for workers).
We might need to rearrange how the policy levers are done a bit (for instance, it sounds like we want separate levers for boiler vs. non-boiler fuel shifting) and think carefully about which levers need to allow the ability to shift to hydrogen (or even arbitrary fuels) and which can assume electricity is the new fuel. Probably only the medium- and high-temp process heating end uses need to support shifting to anything other than electricity.
For regions that don’t have the full industrial end use breakout, a modeler isn’t forced to use all of the available categories. For instance, they could just assign all the energy to a split between the three temperature categories, based on the temperature breakdown data we’ll supply in the (renamed) IHDbT file, just like they do today. (In other words, using the new categories is optional, so it shouldn’t impose any special new burdens on foreign region adaptations.)