Business cases

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Combined heating technologies

Introduction

One of the key features of ETMoses is its ability to determine the business cases for the stakeholders in a local energy solution (LES). These business cases are calculated based on the technologies, networks and strategies available in the LES ad well as on the market model. The latter is described in the market models section.

Three types of costs are taken into account in the business case:

• depreciation costs
• annual fixed operation and maintenance costs
• costs as a result of the financial relations defined in the market models

The depreciation costs are calculated as follows:

depreciation_costs = initial_investment / technical_lifetime

where the initial_investment and technical_lifetime are the initial investment costs and the technical lifetime as defined for each technology and for the assets in the electricity, gas and heat network. The depreciation costs are added to the annual fixed operation and maintenance costs and result in the yearly costs that are shown on the diagonal in the business case matrix for the stakeholder(s) which own(s) (part of) these technologies and/or networks.

The resulting business case is displayed at two places in the ETMoses interface:

1. Under the Business case tab, as can be seen in the image below. The table summarises the business case as a result of depreciation costs, annual fixed O&M costs, and all financial relations in the market model. Here you can also compare the business case for your LES with that of another LES. This allows you to see the effect of different technologies, strategies and market models and decide on the best future for you local energy system.

2. Under the Business case tab when editing a LES. An example of the matrix that can be found there is shown below. This matrix gives more insight into the payments from one stakeholder to another. In addition, the total yearly costs for all technologies in the nodes belonging to a specific stakeholder are shown. Finally, you can add freeform costs, e.g. to take un-modelled avoided costs into account. These freeform costs are shown as the Correction in the business case table described under 1.

Combined heating technologies

ETMoses contains several heating technologies that provide both space heating as well as hot water. Both applications of these technologies are modelled separately, meaning that a LES in ETMoses can e.g. contain both a Households space heater combined network gas and a Households water heater combined network gas, even though in real life this is a single apparatus. By default both 'technologies' in ETMoses will have costs assigned to them, leading to an overestimation of the depreciation costs. One way around it is to change the investment costs of one of the 'technologies' to 0. Note that the number of units for both 'technologies' is not necessarily the same. We recommend setting the investment costs of the least installed 'technology' to zero.