Powering Europe - European Wind Energy Association

annex
The Classic Carbon model is an advanced model simulation
tool for the analysis of the power and carbon
market. The model is a combination of a bottom-up
and a top-down model, capturing the fundamental supply
and demand functions in the power and carbon
market. It is an extension of Pöyry’s power market
model, CLASSIC.
As the name suggests, CLASSIC is Pöyry’s first and
oldest power market model. It has been expanded and
developed over a period of more than 15 years, and
has grown with the market. It is designed to model
the long-term market developments, including power
prices, demand, generation, investments, trade and
CO2 emissions. CLASSIC models the whole European
power market (EU 25 + Norway and Switzerland), and
has been used to analyse developments in the European
power market, in particular price developments,
demand developments, investments in different types
of power generation, and trade between regions.
CLASSIC combines an advanced simulation algorithm
for the European power market with speed and userfriendliness.
CLASSIC’s user interface is Excel, where
both the input data and the results from the simulation
are presented in a menu-based format where users
can easily enter and extract the information they
require, and analyse them in the form of tables and/
or graphs.
The mathematical programming components of CLAS-
SIC are implemented in The General Algebraic Modelling
System GAMS, with CLASSIC’s Excel interface
controlling all the aspects of the communication and
running of the GAMS components. Thus the use of
CLASSIC requires only a standard knowledge of Excel,
and the user does not need to have any knowledge of
GAMS or mathematical programming.
Technical features of CLASSIC
geographicalscope
In the standard version of CLASSIC, all European countries
(EU 27 + Norway and Switzerland) are modelled
168
simultaneously. Denmark is further split into two regions,
Jutland and Zealand. Small countries (for example
Cyprus, Malta) and some countries in Eastern Europe
may be excluded. It is easy to expand or reduce
the number of countries in the model. 22
timestructure
Simulations in CLASSIC are run on a two-level time
resolution. The simulation period is divided up into
one or more time periods, such as quarters, months
or weeks. Each period is then divided up into up to
five load blocks. The load blocks represent the varying
load levels experienced in each period and generally
correspond to times of the day, such as night,
weekend day, evening, day-time peak, etc. Unlike the
periods, the load blocks are not sequential (that is,
load block 2 does not follow load block 1 in time for
example).
Both the period and load-block resolution are userdefinable.
The user simply specifies the length of
each period (which can be of unequal length), and the
hours in a typical week that are mapped to each load
block, and ensures the data corresponds to these
definitions.
Supply
The model includes relevant data for existing generation
technologies and fuel and other operational costs.
Conventional thermal capacity is called into production
whenever market prices cover marginal bids.
Rather than model each individual plant within a given
region, CLASSIC specifies the generation set at the
plant type level of detail. Each plant type has several
general technical properties (such as costs) that are
constant, and other technical properties (such as capacities
and efficiencies) that differ by country. The
plant type approach has been adopted for the following
reasons:
In general there is insufficient data to model all plants
at the same level of detail and data accuracy.
22 The model also uses an external “region” to enable the modeling of electricity trade into and out of the European region (for example
trade between russia and Finland). The data set for this external region consists of cross border transmission capacities to and from the
external region, fixed transmission flows to and from the external region, and/or user defined electricity prices for the external region that
is used when determining price-based trade flows with the external region.
Powering Europe: wind energy and the electricity grid