Sets and Parameters - iea-etsap

B from region A, possibly adjusted for transportation losses). The basic structure is shown in
Figure 7. Bi-lateral trading may be fully described in TIMES by defining an inter-regional
exchange process and by specifying the two pair-wise connections by indicating the regions
and commodities be traded via the set top_ire(r,c,reg,com,p). If trade should occur only in
one direction then only that direction is provided in the set top_ire (export from region r into
region reg). The process capacity and the process related costs (e.g. activity costs, investment
costs) of the exchange process can be described individually for both regions by specifying
the corresponding parameters in each regions. If for example the investment costs for an
electricity line between two regions A and B are 1000 monetary units (MU) per MW and 60
% of these investment costs should be allocated to region A and the remaining 40 % to region
B, the investment costs for the exchange process have to be set to 600 MU/MW in region A
and to 400 MU/MW in region B.
Region A
com
com
Region B
Inter-regional
exchange process
Figure 7: Bilateral trade in TIMES
Bi-lateral trade is the most detailed way to specify trade between regions. However, there
are cases when it is not important to fully specify the pair of trading regions. In such cases,
the so-called multi-lateral trade option decreases the size of the model while preserving
enough flexibility. Multi-lateral trade is based on the idea that a common marketplace exists
for a traded commodity with several supplying and several consuming regions for the
commodity, e.g. for crude oil or GHG emission permits. To facilitate the modelling of this
kind of trade scheme the concept of marketplace has been introduced in TIMES. To model a
marketplace first the user has to identify one internal region that participates both in the
production and consumption of the traded commodity. Then only one exchange process is
used to link the supply and demand regions with the marketplace region using the set
top_ire. 13
The following example illustrates the modelling of a marketplace in TIMES. Assume that
we want to set up a market-based trading where the commodity CRUD can be exported by
regions A, B, C, and D, and that it can be imported by regions C, D, E and F (Figure 8).
13 Note however that some flexibility is lost when using multilateral trade. For instance, it
is not possible to express transportation costs in a fully accurate manner, if such cost depends
upon the precise pair of trading regions in a specific way
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