8.3.5. Commodity Inputs/Outputs

Input

Input commodities are the commodities consumed by each technology. They are defined in a csv file which describes the commodity inputs to each technology, calculated per unit of technology activity.

Output

Output commodities are the commodities produced by each technology. They are defined in a csv file which describes the commodity outputs from each technology, defined per unit of technology activity. Emissions, such as CO2 (produced from fuel combustion and reactions), CH4, N2O, F-gases, can also be accounted for in this file.

General features

To illustrate the data required for a generic technology in MUSE, the electric boiler technology is used as an example. The commodity flow for the electric boiler, capable to cover space heating and water heating energy service demands.

The table below shows the basic data requirements for a typical technology, the electric boiler.

Each sector in MUSE should have two separate CSV files for commodity inputs and outputs, each of which should follow the structure reported in the table below. These should be referenced from the TOML settings file using the commodities_in and commodities_out keys respectively.

Commodities used as consumables - Input commodities

technology	region	year	level	electricity
resBoilerElectric	region1	2010	fixed	300
resBoilerElectric	region1	2030	fixed	290

technology

represents the technology ID and needs to be consistent across all the data inputs.

region

represents the region ID and needs to be consistent across all the data inputs.

year

represents the period of the simulation to which the value applies; it needs to contain at least the base year of the simulation.

level (for input commodities only)

characterises inputs as either fixed or flexible. Fixed inputs are always used by a technology in a fixed proportion. Flexible inputs allow a technology to choose amongst several alternative fuels, depending on which one is cheapest at the time. For example, if a vehicle can use either petrodiesel or biodiesel, these should be specified as flexible inputs, and the technology will choose between them based on the price of each. If a process has a mix of fixed and flexible inputs, these should be split over two rows. Defaults to fixed.

Commodities (one column per commodity)

Any further columns represent commodities, with names matching those defined in the global commodities file. The values in these columns represent the quantity of the commodity consumed or produced by the technology per unit of activity. You do not need to specify all commodities, only those that are consumed or produced by the technologies in the sector

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The input data has to be provided for the base year, after which MUSE will assume that values are constant for all subsequent years, if no further data is provided. If users wish to vary parameters by year, they can provide rows for additional years. In this case, MUSE would interpolate the values between the provided periods and assume a constant value afterwards.