Cost of Auxiliary Commodity

[giulia realmonte]

I would like to know whether the model assign a cost also to auxiliary commodity flows, or the overall cost of a process (capital+operational) is carried only by the primary commodity output.

Can you clarify the question a bit?  
You can define variable costs on the process activity, or on specific process flows, or both. Capital costs, fixed O&M costs and decommissioning costs are defined on the process capacity.  Start-up costs can be defined on started-up capacity, and ramping costs can be defined on activity ramping (difference of activity level between successive timeslices). The overall cost of a process thus includes all these components, and the various cost components are "carried by" the variables involved (VAR_ACT, VAR_FLO, VAR_NCAP, and VAR_IRE, when applicable).

You can specify variable costs also on auxiliary commodity flows of processes, by using FLO_COST / FLO_DELIV. Which kind of auxiliary flows are you referring to?

I am defining a new process, and I would like to understand if the levelized cost for the output commodity is the same for the main activity output (e.g. ELCC) and for an auxiliary commodity that I created (e.g. waste heat). When defining the process cost, I use both capital and variable cost which are referred to the main activity output, while the auxiliary output "waste heat" should come almost for free, or at least it should not have the same cost of the main output.

Is it clearer now?

Giulia