Module 2 - Demand Profiles

Beware - this text is under development...

Overview

This is not yet a separate module, it is still incorporated into Module 1. You can find the profile builder on the Profiles sheet of the main ETRC workbook.

This sheet consists of four parts (which, when it becomes its own workbook) will be different sheets:

    • Annual electricity demands collated from the other worksheets

    • General data on climate and holidays

    • Daily profile 'templates' for each sector, which are used to build the overall profile

    • Instructions and button to generate profiles

The generation of hourly profiles entirely happens inside VBA macros, and so is done 'behind-the-scenes' so to speak.

Basic Usage

At the most basic level, all you have to do is select the scenarios you wish to use for projecting demands to 2050, then go to the Profiles sheet and hit the button at the top. This will launch the profile building macros, and a few minutes later you will have your hourly electricity demand profiles.

Beware: the profile building macro uses the Windows clipboard to copy and paste data. If you wish to use your computer whilst building a set of profiles, do not copy or paste anything, it is likely you will corrupt the resulting workbook. This is fixable, but needs time.

The profiles are built in a separate workbook as they occupy many sheets and a reasonable amount of disk space. This workbook is automatically saved upon completion, given a name that begins with "T&T Electricity Profiles". The name will contain the year the model was set to (either 2010 or 2050) and the date and time at which the profiles were built.

The profiles workbook contains 52 sheets:

    • ElecProfiles - which gives the total final demand for each country

    • Individual country sheets (40) - giving the breakdown of demand from each sector within that country

    • Aggregated regional profiles (11) - same as the individual country sheets, with countries grouped into the 11 wider regions

Altering Profiles

The daily profiles sit in rows 109:229 of the Profiles sheet. There is one or more profile for each sector, depending on whether there are multiple end-uses for electricity (e.g. with buildings, there are electric heater profiles and appliance profiles), or for different scenarios (e.g. with road transport, charging could be done ad-hoc, or it could be centrally optimised through the smart-grid).

Each profile consists of a mean and standard deviation for 24 hourly values. The profile builder adds a stochastic element to these profiles by randomly walking around within this range. There are also parameters which control how rapidly the walk varies, and how far from the mean it is likely to deviate.

Advanced Usage

The macros which control the profile generation can be viewed by hitting Ctrl+F11 and then navigating to the following VBAprojects:

    • M4_DemandBuilder - the main code that is run

    • M4_DemandGUI - the graphical progress bar and launcher code

    • M4_DemandInnards - the core functions which the main code relies on