Building Small City and Town: SAMs and CGE Models Revisited

Léon Walras (1874) had already realised that his neo-classical general equilibrium model could not accommodate autonomous investments. In the early 1960s, Amartya Sen analysed the same issue in a simple, one-sector macroeconomic model of a closed economy. He showed that fixing investment in the model, built strictly on neo-classical assumptions, would make the system overdetermined, and thus one should loosen some neo-classical conditions of competitive equilibrium. He analysed three not neo-classical “closure options”, which could make the model well-determined in the case of fixed investment. His list was later extended by others and it was shown that the closure dilemma arises in the more complex computable general equilibrium (CGE) models as well, as does the choice of adjustment mechanism assumed to bring about equilibrium at the macro level. It was also illustrated through several numerical models that the adopted closure rule can significantly affect the results of policy simulations based on a CGE model. Despite these warnings, the issue of macro closure is often neglected in policy simulations. It is, therefore, worth revisiting the issue and demonstrating by further examples its importance, as well as pointing out that the closure problem in the CGE models extends well beyond the problem of how to incorporate autonomous investments into a CGE model. Several closure rules are discussed in this paper and their diverse outcomes are illustrated by numerical models calibrated on statistical data. First, the analyses are done in a one-sector model, similar to Sen’s, but extended into a model of an open economy. Next, the same analyses are repeated using a fully-fledged multi-sectoral CGE model, calibrated on the same statistical data. Comparing the results obtained by the two models it is shown that although they generate quite similar results in terms of the direction and — to a somewhat lesser extent — of the magnitude of change in the main macro variables using the same closure option, the predictions of the multi-sectoral CGE model are clearly more realistic and balanced.

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Modeling Energy Communities with Collective Photovoltaic Self-Consumption: Synergies between a Small City and a Winery in Portugal

Energies ◽

10.3390/en14020323 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 14 (2) ◽

pp. 323

Author(s):

Guilherme Pontes Luz ◽

Rodrigo Amaro e Silva

Keyword(s):

Economic Feasibility ◽

Small City ◽

Total System ◽

Trade Offs ◽

Southern Portugal ◽

Energy Community ◽

Individual Self ◽

The Impact ◽

The City ◽

Modest Reduction

The recently approved regulation on Energy Communities in Europe is paving the way for new collective forms of energy consumption and production, mainly based on photovoltaics. However, energy modeling approaches that can adequately evaluate the impact of these new regulations on energy community configurations are still lacking, particularly with regards to the grid tariffs imposed on collective systems. Thus, the present work models three different energy community configurations sustained on collective photovoltaics self-consumption for a small city in southern Portugal. This energy community, which integrates the city consumers and a local winery, was modeled using the Python-based Calliope framework. Using real electricity demand data from power transformers and an actual winery, the techno-economic feasibility of each configuration was assessed. Results show that all collective arrangements can promote a higher penetration of photovoltaic capacity (up to 23%) and a modest reduction in the overall cost of electricity (up to 8%). However, there are clear trade-offs between the different pathways: more centralized configurations have 53% lower installation costs but are more sensitive to grid use costs (which can represent up to 74% of the total system costs). Moreover, key actor’s individual self-consumption rate may decrease by 10% in order to benefit the energy community as a whole.

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