Vintage-Based Formulations in Multi-Year Investment Modelling for Energy Systems

TL;DR

This paper compares existing multi-year energy investment models and introduces a new compact vintage formulation that balances modeling accuracy with computational efficiency, implemented in an open-source tool.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel compact vintage formulation that reduces model size while preserving year-specific investment details in energy system planning.

Findings

The compact formulation maintains fidelity of vintage models.

Implementation in TulipaEnergyModel.jl demonstrates practical applicability.

Reduces computational complexity compared to traditional vintage methods.

Abstract

This paper reviews two established formulations for modelling multi-year energy investments: the simple method, which aggregates all capacity regardless of commissioning year, and the vintage method, which explicitly tracks investments by year to capture differences in technical parameters over time. While the vintage method improves modelling fidelity, it significantly increases model size. To address this, we propose a novel compact formulation that maintains the ability to represent year-specific characteristics while reducing the dimensionality of the model. The proposed compact formulation is implemented in the open-source model TulipaEnergyModel.jl and offers a tractable alternative for detailed long-term energy system planning.