Normalization issue when computing hydro resources

[carlosfv92]

Checklist

• [x] I am using the current main branch or the latest release. Please indicate.
• [x] I am running on an up-to-date pypsa-earth environment. Update via conda env update -f envs/environment.yaml.

Describe the Bug

When running scenarios with custom powerplants for a specific country (Bolivia), hydro availability potential is overestimated compared to the fixed EIA data (normalization: method: eia). The problem was tracked down to the normalization process, which is done by region/bus in which the normalized inflow is assigned to represent its availability. Given that each region might have several hydro power plants (Bolivia does, which is why we found the issue), the following computations assume the same normalized value for each of them. Afterward, when computing the potential of a region, the aggregated values are significatively larger (proportional to the number of hydropower plants existing in each region). At the moment, to "solve" the issue, we decided to "manually" provide some adapted inflow availabilities to each powerplant. However, an idea that seems to have sense is to add an additional step (function) before the designation of the p_max_pu in the add_electricity rule and reassign inflow values divided based on the number of powerplants recognized in the base_network (still exploring the solution). If I'm not mistaken, @hazemful was tackling the issue in one of the periodic meetings however, I thought it might be useful to have the issue posted (just to keep track of it and/or at least corroborate that the hunch I was thinking of would be worth exploring).

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[hazemakhalek]

Hi Carlos. Thank for posting about this. I did fix the issue (still locally) with a similar approach. The keyword in my solution is to do the normalization proportionally to the size of the hydro power plant. I will issue a PR soon and we can discuss it in the next call

[davide-f]

Hello @carlosfv92 , I believe this is an old issue, can you confirm? If so, feel free to close it

[carlosfv92]

Huh... I'm not entirely sure if this was dealt with. I mean, the simple way to fix it is in the comment (to just manually adapt the availability values according to local information), but I haven't really tackled it after posting the issue. I was waiting for the PR that was mentioned and I totally forgot about it :/