airmosaic-ai

Technology Component Decomposition Logic

How sector costs are decomposed into technology-level components: energy, non-energy, capital, carbon, and residual.

Why Component Decomposition

sector/cost is a single number per sector per year per region. But it aggregates contributions from multiple technologies with different cost structures. Component decomposition breaks the sector cost into:

• Energy and material input costs: costs from input fuels, feedstocks, electricity
• Non-energy costs: technology fixed and variable non-energy costs (from globaltech_cost.csv)
• Capital and O&M: capital and operations-related costs (where tracked)
• Secondary output credits: value offsets from secondary products
• CO2 costs: carbon price multiplied by emissions
• Residual: unexplained remainder after all tracked components

Technology Cost Weighting

Technology costs are weighted by physical output to match the sector level:

weighted_tech_cost = sum(tech_cost_i * output_proxy_i) / sum(output_proxy_i)
weighted_sector_cost = sector_cost * sum(output_proxy_i) / sum(all_output_i)

Where output_proxy_i is the physical output of technology i (from output-primary/physical-output).

Component Categories

Input Components (energy/materials)

For each technology/input node with demand-physical:

component_cost = io_coefficient * component_unit_price * tech_output

• io_coefficient: input-output coefficient (e.g., GJ coal per ton cement)
• component_unit_price: price of the input good (from marketplace or upstream sector cost)
• tech_output: physical output of this technology

Non-Energy Components

From technology/StubTechCost or equivalent:

• non_energy_cost: fixed + variable non-energy costs
• capital_om_cost: capital and O&M (where separated)

Carbon Cost Components

carbon_cost = co2_price * co2_emissions

Where:

• co2_price comes from Marketplace/market[@name="ChinaCO2"]/price
• co2_emissions comes from technology/CO2-emissions or calculated from input carbon content

Secondary Credit

From technology/output-secondary/physical-output:

secondary_credit = secondary_output * secondary_price

This offsets sector cost (negative value).

Residual

residual = weighted_tech_cost - sum(all_tracked_components)

A large residual indicates untracked cost elements or weighting mismatch.

Generic vs Transport Methods

Generic Method

Used for most industrial sectors (cement, iron and steel, ammonia, etc.):

1. Iterate over technology/input nodes
2. Look up input prices from marketplace or upstream sectors
3. Calculate component costs from coefficients * prices * output
4. Sum non-energy, energy, carbon, secondary

Transport Method

Transport sectors use TranTechnology nodes with different structure:

# Transport uses load-factor and direct price paid
component_cost = load_factor * direct_price_paid * tech_output

Key differences:

• No carbon_content field
• Uses load_factor and direct_price_paid instead of io_coefficient and component_price
• Technology cost formulas differ from industrial sectors

Upstream Cost Lookup

For energy input prices, the decomposition looks up:

1. Marketplace prices: Marketplace/market/price for the input fuel/good
2. Upstream sector cost: If no marketplace price is found, use the producing sector’s sector/cost
3. Fallback: Mark price source as not_found

The lookup is recursive: if sector A uses input from sector B, and sector B’s price comes from marketplace, the decomposition traces this chain.

Quality Assessment

After decomposition, assess quality:

Quality	Condition
good	Residual < 10% of weighted_tech_cost
acceptable	Residual < 25%
poor	Residual >= 25% or missing major components

Large residuals suggest:

• Missing input price data
• Technology not covered by the decomposition method
• Weighting mismatch between technology sample and full sector
• Secondary output not properly credited

Key Relationship

weighted_tech_cost ≈ energy_material + non_energy + capital_om + co2_cost + secondary_credit + residual
weighted_sector_cost ≈ sum of all technology contributions reweighted to sector level

weighted_sector_cost may differ from selected_unit_price because:

• It uses the component technology sample as weights
• Not all technologies in the sector may have been decomposed
• The sector cost applies to the full sector, not just decomposed technologies

This site is open source. Improve this page.