Bimass and Solid Waste Resources

[Valasai]

I am using AnswerTIMES.

Currently, I am using MINED Region for indigenous resources like Coal, Oil and Natural Gas and import those by using Trade Process into the Internal Region.

In the same way, how can I incorporate Biomass, and Solid Waste Resources?

[Antti-L]

Well, you could well model biomass and solid waste resources basically in the same way.  I assume your MINED region is an external region?

Using trade processes between an external mining/extraction region is, indeed, the originally suggested way of modeling primary energy extraction in TIMES. You could use the same MINED region also for biomass and waste, and even for other renewable energy sources (solar, wind, hydro, geothermal). In that way all your domestic primary energy extraction would be modeled in the same manner. You could also create another external region for renewable energy sources, if you like.

As for solar and wind there is no extraction cost, you don't necessarily need any extraction processes, if you set the commodity type FRERENEW (free renewable).  However, for the purposes of primary energy balance reporting it might also be convenient to have all primary energy extraction modeled in the same way.

As a side remark, one should note that there is no necessity to model the extraction processes as trade processes, but you could model them also with normal processes (which don't need to have any input flows).  I guess the original designers of TIMES just felt that trade processes would be the most convenient way of modeling primary energy extraction.