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Austrian Biogas-to-Power Brownfield Capacities

Austria's existing biogas-to-power capacities are historically small and spatially distributed. They are not included from powerplantmatching. Additionally, due to their size, most plants would fall below the capacity threshold of powerplantmatching and would be dropped. PyPSA-AT adds all known biogas-to-power plants explicitly from the Austrian Anlagenregister.

Data

File Purpose
data/pypsa-at/Anlagenregister_electricity_from_renewable_gas_AT.csv Existing AT plants generating electricity from renewable gas (biogas, landfill/sewage gas) with capacity (Engpassleistung) and postal code.
data/pypsa-at/AT-Postal-to-NUTS.csv Maps every Austrian postal code (PLZ) to its NUTS3 region (European Commission).

Data flow

  1. overwrite_powerplants_at rule → overwrite_biogas_to_power_plants_AT (scripts/pypsa-at/overwrite_powerplants.py): each Anlagenregister plant is mapped from PLZ to NUTS3 and added to the powerplants table. The result is written to powerplants_s_{clusters}-overwrite.csv.
  2. add_existing_baseyear (upstream) turns these powerplantmatching .csv into network components:
  3. Plants < 2 MW are tagged biogas; larger plants remain solid biomass.
    • This filter does not apply to the added plants from the Anlagenregister, which are added after the filter gate.
  4. Plants are aggregated per NUTS3 region; a region receives a non-extendable biogas Link only if its summed capacity exceeds threshold_capacity (PyPSA-Eur default = 10 MW)
    • This filter does apply to the added plants from the Anlagenregister.
    • To preserve the small powerplants, the threshold needs to be lowered for PyPSA-AT. The expected threshold is <= 5 MW.

Build years

To best represent the reality of the Austrian biogas-to-power brownfield, the build_year of plants is assumed to be 2003. There is no available data on the actual build times of individual plants. The year 2003 is assumed for two reasons: First, the Austrian government allowed large grants for the building of biogas-to-power plants in the years between 2005 and 2010. Second, with a lifetime of 25 years, plants installed after 2005 would still be viable in the myopic investment period 2030-2040.

To force the assets to be decommissioned before 2030, we assume 2003 + 25 years = 2028 + 1 buffer year = 2029.

Configuration

Enabled via mods.existing_capacities.add_biogas_to_power_plants_AT in config.at.yaml. When disabled, only powerplantmatching plants are used.