Local Energy Solutions
A Local Energy Solution (LES) is a locally defined energy system for which ETMoses performs load and financial calculations. A LES contains data on the local electricity, gas and heat infrastructure as well as the technologies that are connected to these infrastructures. In addition, the user can define several strategies to deal with potential congestion of the electricity network as well as to make most use of locally produced electricity. Finally, one can specify market models and apply these to the stakeholders within the LES. ETMoses gives the resulting businesscase for these stakeholders.
Every scaled scenario starts with a national scenario in the Energy Transition Model. The Energy Transition Model allows you to create a new scenario or open an existing one.
Upon reaching the "Scale this scenario" page, you have the option to choose how many residences will be present in the scaled testing ground scenario (see Figure 1 below).
Figure 1. The scaling interface. Number of residences and sectors can be chosen.
It is possible to explicitly exclude the following sectors from the testing ground
- Agriculture (excluded by default)
- Energy sector (included by default but with scaled down numbers)
- Industry (excluded by default)
Scaling of the national scenario to testing ground size happens as follows: all production and demand of energy is reduced by a fixed factor, which is the specified value for the scaling variable divided by the original value of the scaling variable.
If the national scenario, for instance, contains 10 million residences and your testing ground contains only 100 residences the scaling factor is given by:
scaling factor = 100 / 10,000,000 = 0.00001
All energy in the national scenario will be multiplied by 0.00001 to get the testing ground scenario. In addition to energy, the quantities of all technologies are scaled equivalently. For example, if the national scenario contains a million combi-boilers, using a scale factor of 0.00001 means there are only 10 combi-boilers are present in the testing ground scenario.
Note: It may happen that scaling results in fractional numbers (e.g., 123.4 combi boilers.). In those cases, the number will be rounded to the closest integer. Exceptions to this rule are large power plants. It is possible to place 0.3 nuclear power plants in the testing ground.
There are some sectors in the ETM that are less relevant for small-scale pilot projects:
- Industry
- Agriculture
- Energy (centralized production of electricity and heat)
You can exclude these from your testing ground by using the checkboxes in the scaling interface. This means that these sectors will have no energy demand or production, and are omitted from the interface.
However, if you choose to include these sectors in the testing ground scenario, their energy demand and production will be scaled with the scaling factor as described above.
The scaled scenario still has most of its properties equal to the national scenario that it originated from. The percentage of electric cars, or the number of solar panels is per household is still the same. You can now use the familiar professional interface of the ETM to update your testing ground scenario.
The interface for the testing ground scenario is identical to the standard ETM interface with some modifications:
- The sectors excluded in the scaling step (optional) are removed from the interface
- The "other" sector (this is a statistical residual and irrelevant for the LES)
- The section on storage (it will be replaced by more detailed calculations for the LES)
- The section on production of primary energy carriers is removed
- The section on network costs (it is replaced by the more detailed calculations for the LES)
- The section on fuel chain emissions is omitted
Before After the characteristics of the network have been specified, you can connect the various technologies in the testing ground to the network by editing the technology matrix. This matrix lists all technologies in rows and their technical properties and connections to the network in columns:
The columns of the technology matrix have the following meaning:
- technology: the name of a technology (or base-load) as it will appear on screen
- connection: the end-point of the network that the technology or base-load is connected to
- capacity: the capacity of the technology. This is used to scale the load profiles for technologies. NOTE: for producing technologies, the capacity must be negative
- demand: the yearly demand of the household. This is used to scale the base-load profiles
- investment: the investment costs in euros
- load profile: the 'key' of the load (or base-load) profile. Every profile is uniquely identified by its key which can be specified when creating the profile (see below)
- type: the technology in the ETM that a technology corresponds with. This is used to automatically assign the correct load profile from the load-profile library (see below). The base-load profiles use the special key 'base_load'
Note that the technical properties of the technologies are given by the ETM. Admin users can change technical properties but this may result in local scenario's that cannot be translated back to the national ETM.
