Advancing the First Simulated Year - EnergyInnovation/eps-us GitHub Wiki

Every year or so, it may be desirable to advance the first simulated year in the EPS. For example, in the U.S. EPS, a lot of input data come from the U.S. EIA's Annual Energy Outlook, which tends to only include one historical year (e.g. AEO 2020 only includes data going back to 2019). Since the EPS requires input data for each year it simulates, updating to a newer version of the Annual Energy Outlook may necessitate advancing the first simulated year.

The tasks required to advance the first simulated year are:

In InputData:

1. Update the first simulated year specified in plcy-schd/IT

2. In elec/CCaMC, ensure that the capital costs (CCaMC-BCCpUC) for onshore wind, solar PV, and offshore wind have non-zero data in the first simulated year. (For these three technologies, zeroes in years after the first simulated year indicate the model should use endogenous learning curves to calculate capital costs, while filling these columns with data overrides endogenous learning.) The formulas should allow you to drag to fill down by one cell in each of these three columns. Then, you may safely delete the row for the year that used to be the first simulated year.

Editing EPS.mdl:

3. Open the "Subscripts" control panel and edit the Future Year subscript. Change the range to start with the new, first simulated year.

4. Open the "Control Panel" (next to the "Subscripts" control panel mentioned above) and change the Start Time on the "Time Axis" tab. Here, "Start Time" means the first simulated year (not to be confused with "Start Year" mentioned elsewhere, which is the year prior to the first simulated year).

For the Python script (FractionOfPolicyImplementedThisYear.py) saved in InputData/plcy-schd/FoPITY:

5. Update the first year (FirstYear) to adjust the schedules appearing in the script. After saving this change, run the Python script to update all the Excel files in the FoPITY folder.

Input data updates:

6. Update all variables that contain "Start Year" values, or which reference the start year in formulas. (Start Year refers to the year prior to the first simulated year.) These include:

   • trans/BCDTRtSY
   • trans/SYBSoEVP
   • trans/SYFAFE
   • trans/SYVbT
   • elec/CCaMC (onshore wind, solar PV, offshore wind capital costs, if you merely dragged the formulas and didn't update the cost data above)
   • elec/SYC
   • bldgs/SYCEU
   • bldgs/SYDEC

7. [Optional] Update other input variables for which you have updated data. This may include both non-time-series variables (for instance, the O&M costs in elec/CCaMC) and time series variables (such as most of the energy use variables). This step is not required simply to advance the first simulated year, but it is often best to update to the latest version of input data sources at the same time as the start year is advanced.

8. [Optional] Update the reference scenario settings. It is likely that the reference scenarios now fail to hit the specific emissions targets they were designed to hit, since the policies now start taking effect a year later. (However, if the BAU emissions trajectory has improved due to input data updates, it is possible the scenarios are still sufficient or even are too strong.) Assess how the scenarios now perform and adjust policy settings if appropriate. Overwrite the old .cin files for each reference scenario you update.