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Creating a New Sector

Creating new sectors in Macro involves two main steps:

  1. Choose a unique name for the new sector.
  2. Add the new sector to the MacroEnergy.jl file.

The Commodity Type

Types in Julia

If you're not familiar with Julia's type system, we recommend this section of the Julia documentation. In particular, for more information on abstract types, see the Abstract Types section.

In Macro, the Commodity type is an abstract type which defines a generic type used to represent all commodities in the package. Each specific commodity (e.g., electricity, hydrogen) is then defined as a subtype of Commodity:

MacroEnergy.jl

## Commodity types
abstract type Commodity end
abstract type Electricity <: Commodity end
abstract type Hydrogen <: Commodity end
abstract type NaturalGas <: Commodity end

Here, the operator <: means is-a-subtype-of. In this example, both Electricity and Hydrogen are subtypes of the abstract Commodity type.

flowchart LR %%{init: {'theme': 'base'}}%% subgraph Macro commodity types A[Commodity] A --> B[Electricity] A --> C[Hydrogen] A --> D[NaturalGas] end

This diagram shows the type hierarchy in Macro where:

  • Commodity is the base (abstract) type
  • Electricity, Hydrogen, and NaturalGas are all subtypes of Commodity
  • The arrows show the "is-a-subtype-of" relationship using the <: operator

Adding a new sector to Macro

To define a new sector in Macro, simply add a new line in the MacroEnergy.jl file:

MacroEnergy.jl

# ... existing code ...
abstract type MyNewSector <: Commodity end
# ... existing code ...

This line defines MyNewSector as a new subtype of Commodity. Once added, you can create nodes and edges in the energy system graph that correspond to this new sector.

Next Steps

After defining the new commodity type, you can proceed to build new assets and transformation processes using nodes and edges associated with any Commodity type defined in Macro.