How do I provide initial capital costs when using the API?

[vtnate]

I'm on the urbanopt team at NREL. My existing output from the API includes this field: outputs.Financial.initial_capital_costs = 0.0.

I don't see an analagous field in the input, and from reading the API docs , offgrid_other_capital_costs appears to be the closest thing, which tells me it is only applicable when the off_grid_flag is true.

What is the correct way to provide initial capital costs? Thanks!

[kurt-verdant]

The "API docs" link you included in your question contains the answer to your question. You just need to search on the word "installed". For example, a couple of installed costs can be specified as:

"ElectricStorage":{"installed_cost_per_kw": 50,"installed_cost_per_kwh": 200},"CHP":{"installed_cost_per_kw":700.0}

[vtnate]

Ahh, got it, thank you. Is there any way to input general project capital costs, without specifying a particular end use (such as storage, chp, etc)?

[adfarth]

Hi Nathan, just to be sure, are you looking to add in a general capital cost, so that the resulting financials account for this cost, or to limit the overall capital cost to a specified amount?

[vtnate]

I want to add it in. Thank you for your help!

[adfarth]

Unfortunately there isn't a great way to do this, currently, using the codebase. We have talked about making that input available for non-off-grid runs in the past, so this is a good indication that that would be useful! In the REopt Web Tool, if you go to Saved Evaluations and click "Download Results", there is a section in the resulting Excel Workbook download called "Playground - Explore Effort of Additional Incentives or Costs, Outside of REopt" in which you can explore adding in additional capital cost. You could do the same programmatically as a post-process using the API. For the NPV, this would just require subtracting the additional CAPEX from the NPV from REopt. I can share examples for other financial outputs too if any particular ones are of interest!

[kurt-verdant]

If you know what everything else costs, maybe you could use "microgrid_upgrade_cost_fraction". Although it might depend on whether or not you're using the outage modeling features.

Financial
microgrid_upgrade_cost_fraction
Additional cost, in percent of non-islandable capital costs, to make a distributed energy system islandable from the grid and able to serve critical loads. Includes all upgrade costs such as additional labor and critical load panels. Costs apply only when modeling outages using the outage_start_time_steps, outage_durations, and outage_probabilities inputs, and do not apply when modeling a single outage using outage_start_time_step and outage_end_time_step.