The ACOE is calculated according to these equations
\begin{cases} El_{sold}[MWh] = \sum_{i=1}^{8760} min(El_{pr,i}; RL_{i}) = \sum_{i=1}^{8760} min(P_{inst} \cdot el_{pr,i}; RL_{i}) \\ ACOE_{ P_{inst} + \Delta P } \left[ \frac{ $ } { MWh } \right] = \frac{ Cost_{ P_{inst} + \Delta P } - Cost_{ P_{inst} } } { El_{sold, P_{inst} + \Delta P } - El_{sold, P_{inst} } } \end{cases}
ACOE requires as input the residual load (\(RL_i \in MW\)) of the country where the technology is applied and the specific electricity production profiles \(\cdot el_{pr,i} \in kWh/kW \) of the technology of interest.
ACOE is calculated assuming one year of operation with hourly discretization, therefore the inputs are to be provided with this granularity and time span.
The online calculator can be operated some predefined cases using the loads and PV/wind profiles available for some countries, but it can be used using own cases of interest
For the predefined case option, choose a Country at a time and one or more renewable energy technology.
You can use the bar controls as a measure of the assumptions about:
For the customized case option, upload two input files containing 8.760 hourly Country specific Data of \(kWh/kW\) specific electricity production* and 8.760 hourly Country specific Data of MW load.
Files format requested is .csv, containing two columns, where the first column is the time and second column is specific electricity production/Load value. First row will contain data labels of the two columns (Date; Load MW/Production kWh/kW).
Download the file example files as an example to be filled: Production.csv Load.csv
The specific electricity production could be obtained through available models (e.g. PVGIS, SAM). However, as the \(El_{pr,i}\) shall be as consistent as possible with the load due to the hourly balance. An option is to retrieve the electricity production from the TSO databases and calculate it as follow
\begin{equation} El_{pr,i} = \frac{ El_{TSO,i} }{ P_{TSO} } \end{equation}Where \(El_{TSO,i}\) is the hourly generation and \(P_{TSO}\) is the installed capacity for the considered technologies taken from the different national TSO.
The residual load \(RL\) can ne determined from Transmission System Operators (TSOs) that provides the grid situation on hourly basis with the amount supplied by the different generation technologies. It is suggested to consider as RL only the production of fossil fuel power stations.