Costs in the model should be in absolute numbers

wmeyers commented 11 years ago

I was wondering why it seems that the CO2 price has very little influence in the model. I remembered that last year when we were doing the Watt Nu sessions 700% price increases for CO2 and much lower amounts of free rights (between 0% and 25%) led to huge results in making renewables cheaper than fossil fuels. Now it barely leads to grid parity. What happened?

I think the reason is that the CO2 price is super volatile, and has been on a downward trend for the last years. Last year it was still above 10 euro per tonne, but now it is below 5. 700% of >10 euro is a much different number than 700% of <5 euro.

I've been thinking about this and the more I think about it the more I feel that we should have absolute numbers for prices in the model, especially for the fuels and for CO2. Maybe for the plants we should stick to percentages, as these numbers change much less.

Of course this approach will lead to wrong scenario's as well: in a couple of years from now people might say that a oil price of X $/barrel is complete nonsense, but at least it will be clear that the scenario is wrong, instead of it being hidden behind a percentage change in a number that is not even visible in the interface anymore.

@AlexanderWirtz and @dennisschoenmakers please chip in. I don't think this is something for the short term and should be included in a overhaul of the ETM as a whole. Curious to hear your thoughts!

dennisquintel commented 11 years ago

First of all, I think we should be consistent amongst the cost sliders in the model: they should either (A) all be percentages or (B) all absolute numbers.

However, if we would change the current percentages to absolute numbers, that would mean that the user is going to have to input some rather weird cost parameters, e.g.:

cost of biomass
cost of investment for wind mills

Given that fact, I think it makes more sense to keep percentages IMO.

The issue at hand here has also to do with the relative durability / life time of a scenario: in our current model, scenarios from last year make no sense in the current app. @ChaelKruip, @AlexanderWirtz and me have planned a meeting on April 8th to discuss this issue.

AlexanderWirtz commented 11 years ago

I agree but would like to offer an alternative: users SET a percentage slider, which leads to an absolute price. That is stored in a scenario, so that loading a scenario involves calculating the slider setting to the appropriate percentage (based on the absolute umber stored and the absolute number that happens to be the 'present day' value.

Such a thing should be doable, right?

ChaelKruip commented 11 years ago

The suggestion by @AlexanderWirtz has some drawbacks:

Stored prices may lead to impossible slider settings: if the maximum price is chosen, the %-slider is at its maximum as well, say 100%. If the price then changes due to a carrier cost update or such, and becomes smaller, the slider value needs to become larger 100%!
This breaks the uniformity of storing scenarios.

Both drawbacks are big enough to not do this IMO.

ChaelKruip commented 11 years ago

Assigning to @AlexanderWirtz as I think this is more a 'representation'/'numbers' thing than a 'modeling' thing.

dennisquintel commented 11 years ago

From all the discussion and (deservedly) objections, I would say that this 'Issue' should be created into a (small) project after the summer. This has a lot of impact and fall-out, which needs to be analyzed first.

dennisquintel commented 11 years ago

Adding label 'on-hold'

wmeyers commented 11 years ago

I've added the label ETM interface improvements and assigned myself. Kept the label On Hold. I'm planning to do some more thinking on this in the coming months.

wmeyers commented 10 years ago

9 months have passed and I've just spent 5 minutes thinking about this again.

However, if we would change the current percentages to absolute numbers, that would mean that the user is going to have to input some rather weird cost parameters, e.g.:

cost of biomass

cost of investment for wind mills

I think this is actually a good thing. It gives much more insight into the actual costs that have to be paid for certain technologies. How many people realize that wind turbines cost millions of euro's?

Some more thought would have to go into the units for fuels, because they are not easily compared as it is now.

Still, I think from a learning point of view asking users to specify absolute cost changes is better than percentage changes.

Assigning @ChaelKruip to bring this further or close as he sees fit!

ChaelKruip commented 10 years ago

Closing. Too much work for the moment.

quintel / etsource

Costs in the model should be in absolute numbers #227