The Price Escalator feature allows you to model price changes that occur over the lifetime of the project. It does this by running a simulation for every year in the project life. Without the escalation, HOMER Front runs a single simulation and extrapolates the results over the rest of the project lifetime. Price Escalation significantly increases the calculation time, but allows you to model some important phenomena that can't be captured in a single year simulation.
The Price Escalation feature allows you to input anticipated percentage changes in energy market prices or pricing year by year. The Price Escalator feature can model:
•Energy Market price escalation
•Capacity market price escalation
•Time of Delivery price escalation
Using the Price Escalator
To consider price escalation, select the price escalator checkbox. You can set either a constant percentage or a percentage for each year individually. To set a constant percentage by which a component can change every year, enter the percentage number in the box fand select the %/year variable variable.
To modify the relative value of the variable for each year individually, click the Escalation by year button in the drop-down. The Escalation by year table appears in a pop-up window. When you first open the year-by-year table, the multipliers are calculated based on the percentage entered in the change rate (%/year) box.
Note: The calculation takes longer using the Price Escalator feature. The calculation time is increased over the normal calculation by a factor of the number of years in the project lifetime, and significant extra overhead associated with the calculations. When you use this feature, make your equipment Sizing options and sensitivity analysis are small.
