First Eligible Year Column
Column Type = Text
The First Eligible Year column is used to assign the first year when this new technology type resource is available for addition to the area during a long-term capacity expansion study. Before this year, the resource will not be used in calculations for dispatch and value. (This column can also be called Begin Date. If entered as a date, only the year will be used.)
NOTE: All date columns in an input database and project Change Set will automatically be converted to column type Text. This change was necessary to solve a problem Microsoft has built into their core XML data handling routines that save and retrieve date variables in time zone referenced values. This gave rise to the troublesome circumstance that when a user would save a Change Set or XML dataset with date columns in the table, if the same dataset were later opened in another time zone, the day portion of date variables would have changed. This created a significant issue for transfers of project databases to EPIS for our clients who are not on Pacific Time. The date conversion to text solves this problem and makes dates independent of time zone. The automatic column type conversion will be logged on the Status screen when an unconverted input database is opened in this version. Date fields currently being used in linked input tables in Excel will need to be manually converted to text.
First Eligible Year Column