Using energy units as metadata for default variables may limit applicability to non-energy sectors
FLomb opened this issue · comments
Problem description
Model variables in the math/base.yaml
file have been assigned units
to populate the metadata. These units are currently energy specific, such as: energy
or power
. Nonetheless, Calliope is generally applicable, and has been applied in the past, also to non-energy flows and amounts, for instance, CO2 or water flows and stored amounts. Energy-specific units would conflict with this liberty.
One solution to have similar units but not energy specific might be to modify (i) power
into rate
and (ii) energy
into amount
, or something along these lines.
Calliope version
0.6.11-dev
Possibilities for units from offline discussions:
energy_cap
:carrier_unit_per_hour
carrier_prod
/con
:carrier_unit
storage
:carrier_unit
This is very generic but tries to deal with the fact that each carrier
can have different units (e.g., energy: kWh, water: m3, ...), but does lose the info on the scale of things, i.e. all carriers should be of the same scale. Otherwise the system energy balance will be wrong.
Moving out of beta and int oa discussion thread since it is not critical to anything in particular and could do with more dicussing with a wider audience.