Modelling Offshore Wind in GCAM

[fkanyako]

Hi, @pkyle
I am working on the modeling Wind Energy (both onshore and offshore) in GCAM 4.4. I have some urgent questions and I will appreciate very much any help I can get.

Main question: What is the best approach to adding off-shore wind to GCAM?

1. It looks like the on-shore wind data enters the system in
   input/gcam-data-system/energy-data/rawdata/Zhou_wind.csv, processed by
   the script energy-processing-code/level1/LA114.wind.R.

2. It does not appear that there is any existing structure into which we
   can plug in data to generate the off-shore wind.

3. Do we need to create a file with the structure of Zhou_wind.csv and
   create a new R script like LA114.wind.R to process it?

4. Is this enough to generate the required entries in the
   global-technology-database and the regional capacity constraints, or is
   some other "glue" required?

5. Later, we may want to support both fixed and floating offshore wind.
   Would these need to compete in a separate nest for the available
   offshore wind resource, and then the composite of these compete with
   other electricity technologies?

Any input on especially question 5 would be particularly helpful.

Happy to receive any assistance I can get.

Thanks

[pralitp]

You may want to check @zcranmer's work which is still available at #18. Where she included offshore wind into GCAM as part of her PHD dissertation.

We have worked to incorporate (a slightly simplified version of) her changes and are hoping it gets included in the next release of GCAM. However if you are urgently looking to have this capability you may not want to wait for that.

[towro]

Hi @fkanyako,

I am interested in incorporating new technologies into the base GCAM model. I tried using @zcranmer's code as on GCAM v5.2 but got several errors. Any help on how to do this will be greatly appreciated.