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Techno-Economic Assumptions

The database of cost assumptions is retrieved from the repository PyPSA/technology-data and then saved to a file data/costs/*/costs_{year}.csv. The config/config.yaml provides options to choose a reference year. To select a specific version of the cost assumptions, see Managing Data Versions.

costs:
  year: 2050

The file includes cost assumptions for all included technologies for specific years compiled from various sources, namely for

  • discount rate,
  • lifetime,
  • investment (CAPEX),
  • fixed operation and maintenance (FOM),
  • variable operation and maintenance (VOM),
  • fuel costs,
  • efficiency, and
  • carbon-dioxide intensity.

Many values are taken from a database published by the Danish Energy Agency (DEA).

The given overnight capital costs are annualised to net present costs with a discount rate of \(r\) over the economic lifetime \(n\) using the annuity factor

\[ a = \frac{1-(1+r)^{-n}}{r}. \]

Based on the parameters above the marginal_cost and capital_cost of the system components are automatically calculated.

Modifying Assumptions

Some cost assumptions (e.g. marginal cost and capital cost) can be directly set in the config/config.yaml (cf. Section costs in Configuration).