Release notes

This page highlights key changes in NEMO since its initial public release. For a full history of NEMO releases, including the code for each version, see the Releases page on NEMO's GitHub site.

Version 1.6

• Interest rates for technologies, storage, and transmission lines: Added parameters for interest rates for technologies (InterestRateTechnology), storage (InterestRateStorage), and transmission lines (interestrate property of TransmissionLine). If you specify an interest rate, NEMO uses it to calculate financing costs for new endogenous capacity, assuming the capital costs are financed at the interest rate and repaid in equal installments over the life of the capacity. The financing costs are reported in three new output variables (vfinancecost, vfinancecoststorage, and vfinancecosttransmission) and enter into NEMO's cost minimization objective. They are also considered when calculating salvage values for technologies, storage, and transmission lines.

• Negative emissions: Revised NEMO to accommodate negative emissions from technologies. You can activate this feature by specifying a negative emission factor (EmissionActivityRatio). If a technology has a negative emission factor for a pollutant with an externality cost (EmissionsPenalty), it can generate negative emission penalties (vannualtechnologyemissionspenalty / vannualtechnologyemissionpenaltybyemission), lowering total system costs. In this case, you may need to constrain the technology's operation to avoid an unbounded (infeasible) optimization problem. For example, if a technology can generate negative emissions of a pollutant with an externality cost, the cost of building and running the technology is lower than the externality value, and there are no limits on the technology's deployment and use, the optimization problem will be unbounded.

• Deprecation of technology, storage, and transmission-specific discount rates: Based on discussions with users, retired this functionality that was introduced in NEMO 1.5.

• Other performance improvements: Improved the robustness of the createnemodb function.

Version 1.5

• Technology, storage, and transmission-specific discount rates: Revised NEMO so users can specify a different discount rate for each technology and region, storage and region, and transmission line. Technology and storage-specific rates are set with the new DiscountRateTechnology and DiscountRateStorage parameters. Rates for transmission lines are defined as part of the transmission line dimension. The DiscountRate parameter continues to provide the default discount rate for each region.

• Minimum utilization: Added a parameter - MinimumUtilization - that enforces minimum utilization rates for technology capacity.

• Other performance improvements: Streamlined logic for scenario database upgrades.

Version 1.3.1

• Solver parameters in NEMO configuration files: Added support for setting solver parameters via a NEMO configuration file. Users can activate this feature by assigning a comma-delimited list of parameter name-value pairs to the parameters key in a configuration file's solver block. The pairs should be in this form: parameter1=value1, parameter2=value2, .... See the documentation for configuration files for more information.

• Forcing mixed-integer optimization problems: Added an option that forces NEMO to formulate a mixed-integer optimization problem when calculating a scenario. This can improve performance with some solvers. The option can be invoked as an argument passed to calculatescenario (forcemip) or in a NEMO configuration file (forcemip key in calculatescenarioargs block). See the documentation for calculatescenario and configuration files for more information.

Version 1.3

• Julia and JuMP upgrade: Updated NEMO to run on Julia 1.5.3 and JuMP 0.21.6. The new version of JuMP includes support for the most recent versions of key solvers, among them Cbc (2.10), CPLEX (12.10 and 20.1), and Gurobi (9.0 and 9.1). Note that this version of JuMP also uses a new solver abstraction layer, MathOptInterface, which changes how solvers are referenced when creating a JuMP model. See the documentation for calculatescenario for more information and examples.

Version 1.2

• Ramp rates: Added support for modeling technology ramp rates. You can activate this feature with two new parameters - RampRate and RampingReset.

• Parallel processing upgrades: Revised calculatescenario so users can take advantage of parallelization without having to invoke Julia's Distributed package and add processes manually. Introduced the numprocs argument, which lets users specify the number of processes to use for parallelized operations. When numprocs is set, NEMO initializes new processes as needed. Refactored the queries in calculatescenario to parallelize as many of them as possible.

• Xpress solver: Added Xpress as an officially supported NEMO solver. This includes incorporating Xpress in the Julia system image that's distributed with the NEMO installer program.

• Installer program enhancements: Upgraded the installer program to facilitate installation when the executing user isn't an operating system administrator. Also improved the integration of the installer program with LEAP.

• General error handling in calculatescenario: Restructured calculatescenario so exceptions are trapped and presented along with information on how to report problems to the NEMO team.

• Other changes: Streamlined NEMO's logic for upgrading legacy database versions in calculatescenario. Now the functions that perform upgrades are only called when needed. Removed the createnemodb_leap function since LEAP isn't using it.