Energy mix and how it’s calculated
Generally, the energy mix describes of which energy carriers and to which shares a total energy quantity is constituted. In the MICATool, a differentiation is made between final energy consumption (FEC, energy consumed by end users) and its relevant carriers, and primary energy consumption (PEC, total energy entering the system) and its relevant carriers.
Final energy carriers
In order to simplify the gathering of data, the final energy carriers have been grouped into 7 main groups, shown in the table below:
Id |
Label |
Description |
|---|---|---|
1 |
Electricity |
Electricity |
2 |
Oil |
Oil |
3 |
Coal |
Coal |
4 |
Gas |
Gas |
5 |
Biomass And Waste |
Biomass And Waste |
6 |
Heat |
District Heating And CHP |
7 |
H2 And E-Fuels |
H2 And Synthetic Fuels |
This table is from back_end/import/public/id_final_energy_carriers.xlsx. Details about the mapping of energy carriers to these groups can be found in back_end/import/public/mapping__final_energy_carrier__primary_energy_carrier.xlsx.
Primary energy carriers
The primary energy carriers have been grouped into 6 overarching energy carrier types:
Id |
Label |
Description |
|---|---|---|
1 |
Oil |
Oil (incl. Biodiesel) |
2 |
Coal |
Coal |
3 |
Gas |
Gas (incl. Biogas) |
4 |
Biomass And Renewable Waste |
Biomass And Non-Renewable Waste |
5 |
Renewables |
PV, Wind, Geothermal, Tidal, Etc |
6 |
Other |
Other (incl. Nuclear, Non-Renewable Waste, etc.) |
This table is from back_end/import/public/id_primary_energy_carriers.xlsx. Details about the mapping of energy carriers to these groups can be found in back_end/import/public/mapping__final_energy_carrier__primary_energy_carrier.xlsx.
Given the fact that electricity, heat, and H2 and synthetic fuels need to be generated from primary energy carriers (see Chapter below), they are not listed among primary energy carriers.
Conversion of final to primary energy consumption
Since some indicators need values in primary and not final energy consumption, a module in the MICATool converts these values.
Final energy carrier groups that are also existent among primary energy carriers (oil, coal, gas, biomass and renewable waste) are allocated to that category. For now, no factor accounts for the transformation of these products between primary and final energy consumption.
For H2 and synthetic fuels, a conversion from electricity with an efficiency coefficient is chosen, assuming the national energy mix for electricity generation. Once the relevant market has grown in significance, this will be adapted to account for more ways to produce hydrogen, in all its colours.
The energy quantities of primary energy carriers necessary to generate one energy unit of electricity or heat are described in one vector each. The user has the opportunity to alter this vector in the global parameters. If this is not done, these vectors are calculated taking into account dedicated electricity or heat generation, as well as cogeneration (CHP). For all dedicated electricity and heat generation sources, the total input quantities from the six primary energy carriers are divided by the total transformed energy output.
In the case of cogeneration, the complexity lies in the allocation of the inputs to the two different outputs. Among the different methods that are used in such cases, an “equivalence number method” has been chosen. This is mainly due to the fact, that this approach does not require additional exogenous values or assumptions. It is merely assumed that the average (national) efficiency of dedicated electricity and heat generation is improved proportionally for both energy carriers when generated in a cogeneration process in order to reach the CHP’s higher efficiency.
These two components are weighted with the share of energy generated by dedicated and cogeneration power plants with the final to primary energy carriers conversion vectors as result. The input values stem from the Eurostat complete energy balances and from the EU Reference Scenario 2020.
The functioning of the FEC-to-PEC-conversion module can be found here.
Calculation of final energy mix
If no data is provided by the user, default assumptions are made in order to provide a plausible energy mix. When assuming the energy mix affected by improvement actions selectable in the MICATool, no such data is available across the sectors and subsectors. Instead, energy mixes are generally issued by statistical offices or the EU Reference Scenario 2020 per subsector or end-use, which differs from MICAT’s improvement actions. Thus, the tool uses a workaround, in order to be able to use the available datasets.
For each country and combination of sector (or subsector) and improvement action, a vector containing a coefficient for each final energy carrier is stored in the database. This vector is multiplied elementwise with the sector’s (or subsector’s) energy mix vector. After normalising the vector, the improvement action energy mix is obtained.
The equations behind the multiplication and normalisation are described here.
This process has the benefit of allowing the use of widely available sectoral energy mix data. Since the coefficient vector is rather time-constant, merely the sectoral data needs regular updating. Moreover, this allows users to adjust the data to fit their use case by merely altering sectoral data, which is significantly easier to gather, whether on EU, national, regional, or local level.
The calculation of the vectors containing the coefficients is done using a combination of past statistical and scenario data. They are gathered by dividing the improvement actions’ energy mix by the (sub-)sectoral energy mix, with the data needing to stem from one consistent source or scenario. Since some of these sources and scenarios are not public, merely the coefficients are stored in the database, not the underlying datasets and scenarios.
How these vectors of coefficients are calculated is shown here.