cerf¶
Capacity Expansion Regional Feasibility model. An open-source geospatial Python package for evaluating and analyzing the feasibility of future electricity technology capacity expansion plans by siting power plants where they are the least-cost option.
pip install cerf
cerf was created to evaluate the on-the-ground siting feasibility of an electricity system expansion plan by:
Translating a capacity expansion plan into individually sited renewable and non-renewable power plants across a region.
Emulating regional practices that address local congestion and interconnection costs as well as the social, land, and policy-based constraints faced by developers.
Providing a flexible and computationally efficient tool to understand the relative importance of different factors affecting the feasibility of siting new infrastructure, such as energy justice, land suitability, water availability, and emissions.
What cerf does, how to install it and its package data, and which Python and dependency versions are supported.
Site a full CONUS expansion plan in a few lines, chain runs across years with retirement, run regions in parallel, and plot the result.
Configuration file reference, input data requirements, the NOV / interconnection / NLC equations, the competition algorithm and every output column.
Every public function and class - run, Model, Stage, ProcessRegion, Competition,
Interconnection and more.
How it works¶
Build per-technology grids of locational marginal price, interconnection cost, generation, operating cost and Net Operational Value, and combine the technology suitability rasters.
Region by region, technologies compete for each cell on Net Locational Cost; the winner is sited, its buffer is excluded, and the loop repeats until the expansion plan is met or no land remains.
Return one row per sited plant with coordinates, costs, LMP zone and retirement year - ready to feed the next year’s run or your own analysis.
The metric that drives siting is Net Locational Cost (NLC): the annualised cost of interconnecting a plant to the electricity transmission network (and to a gas pipeline for gas technologies) minus its Net Operational Value (NOV) - the value of the electricity it generates at the local locational marginal price less its operating costs. Every input to both terms is configurable per technology and per time step; see User guide for the equations.