Initial Capital Cost

Initial capital cost is the initial investment for the purchase of a component at time zero. This expense is computed for component *i* by considering its unit cost *Cunit*,*<sup>i</sup>* and its cardinality *Ni*:

$$\mathbb{C}\_{capital,i} = N\_i \cdot \mathbb{C}\_{unit,i} \tag{1}$$

where *Ci* is the cost of one unit of component *i*; *Ni* is the number of units of *i*. We decouple the two terms to allow the possibility of tuning the size of components in the exploration. Many components can in fact being seen as modular (e.g., a PV panel consists of a number of PV modules, a battery pack of a number of cells, etc.).
