Marginal Abatement Cost Curve App for OriginPro 2020

The Marginal Abatement Cost Curve (MACC) is a visual tool used by economists, researchers and policy-makers to prioritize and develop pollution reduction and mitigation strategies.

Interpretation of the MACC is fairly straightforward:

• The vertical axis represents the cost of abatement (in the above example, cost per ton of CO₂ equivalent).
• The “zero” point on the vertical axis, drawn as a horizontal line, is referred to as the “business as usual” (BAU) line.
• The horizontal axis represents the abatement potential for each opportunity (mitigation strategy) within a given year.
• The width of each block is proportional to the potential benefit of implementation, while the height of the block is proportional to net cost of implementation.
• Blocks are arranged from the least costly to implement, to the most costly to implement. Blocks that fall below the BAU line represent a potential for cost savings over BAU; those that rise above the BAU line represent an expected net cost.

FREE OriginPro 2020 MACC App

OriginLab offers a free App for drawing MACC, for users of OriginPro 2020. If you do not currently have OriginPro 2020, you may want to download a Trial Version of OriginPro 2020 and give it a try. Once you’ve downloaded and licensed the trial version of OriginPro, you can install the MACC App as instructed below.

To obtain the MACC App:

1. Run your OriginPro 2020 software and press F10. This opens the App Center.
2. Click on the Search tab and search for “MACC”.
3. Click the icon to download and install the MACC App.
4. For information on App usage, see the MACC App page on our File Exchange.

Plotting with the MACC in OriginPro

Plotting the MACC in OriginPro is fairly straightforward. You will likely want to customize the data labels and add a few text objects of your own for informational purposes.

When customizing data labels, you will press the CTRL key and click on a label to create what we call a “special point”. This allows you to customize labels individually — change position, font size, text color, etc. — without affecting all other data labels.

The other key detail is how to create the “L-shaped” leader line that we use in the graph above. We do that by setting the Plot Details Label tab Connect option to Step-Horiz, then in the accompanying text box, enter “0” as shown in the following screenshot:

If you have a working copy of OriginPro 2020 (including the Trial software), you can download a sample project for the MACC graph shown at the top of the page.

More About Origin and OriginPro Apps

Origin Apps were conceived as a way to add specialized features to OriginLab’s already powerful Origin and OriginPro graphing and data analysis software. Users gain access to features that fit a particular need and they are able to pick and choose only those Apps that they find useful. In addition, the Apps themselves can be developed and deployed quickly, often between major software releases, making it easier to add new functionality to Origin/OriginPro. OriginLab encourages user requests for the development of new Apps and provides guidance to users on developing your own Apps for your organization or working group.

• You can browse available Apps from the App Center or if you like, visit the OriginLab File Exchange at originlab.com/fileexchange.
• If you are an Origin user and would like to submit a request for an App, please enter your request on this page of our website.
• To learn more about how you can develop Apps for your organization or working group, see developer documentation for OriginLab Apps.

We hope that this has been informative. Thank you for reading!

References:

• https://www.theccc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/pr_supporting_research_SAC_agriculture.pdf
• https://www.climateworksaustralia.org/resource/how-to-read-a-marginal-abatement-cost-curve/