Refinery cannot handle natural gas import/export for both NL and GER

[Richard-Deuchler]

As discovered in #50, refinery currently cannot deal with the fact that Germany is a net importer of natural gas in the present scenario. This is because we hard-coded the demand of the energy_import_natural_gas converter to 0.0.

It is now not possible to make Germany a net importer of natural gas.

(note: this is a screeenshot of what it will look like after we fixed the bug with the unknown biogas demand in the German scenario. The fix is not yet pushed/merged but will be soon).

Because the extraction of natural gas is not sufficient, and import is set to 0.0, there is not enough supply of natural_gas. The converter energy_natioanal_gas_network_gas does not receive enough energy.

including @antw

[Richard-Deuchler]

To further illuminate:
When not hard-coding the demand of import_natural_gas, the NL graph is incomplete and looks like this:

Refinery does not understand that energy that energy_natioanal_gas_network_gas is lacking should be satisfied with natural_gas.

[antw]

Refinery does not understand that energy that energy_natioanal_gas_network_gas is lacking should be satisfied with natural_gas.

@Richard-Deuchler Are you sure you have the very latest version of Refinery? I made changes this week which should have made exactly that sort of calculation possible. In your Atlas directory, please git up and bundle install.

If that doesn't solve it, let me know.

[wouterterlouw]

Note that energy_national_gas_network_natural_gas is in fact a pseudomixer. If it was just a normal node with incoming edges of the same carrier, Refenery was most likely able to calculate it! See also quintel/etsource#498.

[antw]

I just tried this myself, and @Richard-Deuchler is right; the energy_treatment_natural_gas → energy_national_gas_network_gas edge doesn't get calculated. I'll look into it and find out why.

[antw]

I'll look into it and find out why.

My changes could calculate the natural gas edge, but only if we know the demand of both the treatment node and the network node; which we do only if we already know the import demand.

@wouterterlouw is also right; if the greengas distribution node were outputting natural gas instead (so that the network node had only one incoming carrier), Refinery will deal with that perfectly.

Fortunately, I can hack something together to deal with this in the short-term:

Initial values	Calculated

[ChaelKruip]

Fortunately, I can hack something together to deal with this in the short-term:

👍

[ChaelKruip]

Assigning @antw

[StijnDellaert]

Note that, although it is invisible with the currently incalculable nodes, the uranium distribution/treatment/import/export will fail validation for Germany since extraction is higher than use, but the import and export are linked to different converters.

Any chance the fix you're making will also fix this @antw ? (it's this issue #44 I think, it's on hold for now)

[antw]

I have pushed the Refinery changes. Please git up and bundle install in your Atlas directory. The fix works specifically for this arrangement of nodes: a mixer with multiple input carriers, we know the demands of all but one incoming edge (i.e. we know the greengas input to the mixer). Over the next few days I'll clean this up and improve the way Refinery deals with nodes which have multiple carriers.

@Richard-Deuchler Does this fix the issue to your satisfaction (for the moment, at least)?

[StijnDellaert]

Nice work Anthony, the natural gas part is working now for DE and NL, even without the ugly hard-coded import/export.
Shall I push the etsource update (removing ~demand = 0 from energy_import_natural_gas)?

[ChaelKruip]

the uranium distribution/treatment/import/export will fail validation for Germany since extraction is higher than use, but the import and export are linked to different converters.

@StijnDellaert Did you check this as well? Does it work?

[antw]

Did you check this as well? Does it work?

@Richard-Deuchler said to me on Skype that this is still a problem.

[StijnDellaert]

No, we get the validation error now, but this was described in #44

[antw]

Can the uranium import/export be moved to the same node, was was done with natural gas? Long-term we want to support multi-node import export in Refinery (as described in #44), but there's pretty much no chance it will be done in time to use with this month's deploy.

[ChaelKruip]

After talking to @AlexanderWirtz, I propose to remove the energy_treatment_uranium_oxide node. This will effectively connect the import and export to the same node.

@Richard-Deuchler @StijnDellaert @wouterterlouw any objections?

[Richard-Deuchler]

I am ok with it. 👍

[StijnDellaert]

No objections

[wouterterlouw]

@ChaelKruip 👍

[ChaelKruip]

Done. Closing.