Open tools and applications

The list below overviews several collaborative research projects and open-source tools initially developed for the energy transition and decarbonization projects, made available for public use, and currently being extended and refactored to meet the open-source community standards.

energyRt

A macro-energy system modeling framework in R. Used in large-scale modeling projects like USENSYS, IDEEA, CEPRO (see below), and several other electricity and energy system optimization models. Currently undergoing redesign to integrate with multimod. Key features include:

  • Design technological processes and economic elements (e.g., generation, storage, transmission, inter-regional and international trade, resources, supply and demand-side technologies).

  • Specify scenarios and policy constraints (e.g., emissions, renewable portfolio standards, taxes, subsidies, caps).

  • Flexible definition of the model horizon and sub-annual time resolution.

  • Solve scenarios in GAMS, Julia/JuMP, Python/Pyomo, or GLPK/MathProg.

  • Read and process results, compare scenarios, and visualize outputs in R.

  • Customize reports for reproducible research.

multimod

A domain-specific modeling language in R for expressing optimization problems. Designed for cross-platform compatibility with GAMS, Pyomo, JuMP, GMPL. Converts parsed models to LaTeX, other modeling languages to facilitate the exchange of mathematical models across different languages and solver frameworks. This new package is in active development. The current version supports:

  • Reading and parsing mathematical models from GAMS (further releases will include Pyomo, JuMP, and AMPL/GMPL models).

  • Visualize equations/constraints structure.

  • Export to LaTeX for documentation, studying, and publication.

  • Export to GAMS, (Pyomo, JuMP, etc.) for solving.

  • Further features will include “folding” (dropping unused dimensions of parameters, variables, and equations), equations-to-functions to reproduce variables based on data, and more.

  • Native Python and C++ interfaces are under consideration as well.

USENSYS

United States Energy System Optimization Model: a linear programming macro-model for long-term capacity expansion, emissions mitigation, and policy evaluation. The model is based on the energyRt framework. It currently covers the U.S. electricity system, including generation, transmission, storage, and demand-side technologies. USENSYS was a part of several recent studies, including:

multimod logo

IDEEA

Indian Zero Carbon Energy Pathways(IDEEA) ia an open modeling initiative for India’s zero-carbon electricity future. Scenario-based evaluation of deep decarbonization pathways with high VRE penetration. The model has 5 and 32 region versions, using 1200 points of locations of renewable energy, and 40 years of weather data (from merra2ols database). It is based on the energyRt and have been applied in several studies, including:

CEPRO

China Electric Power Sector model. Originally part of CEMF-02. CEPRO v2 is planned for update with enhanced renewable granularity and integration of multimod. Collaborators are welcome to join the effort. The model have been used in the following study:

More…

Explore more open tools and data on GitHub: https://github.com/optimal2050

Potential Projects

PyPSA-Eur in R

PyPSA-Eur is a large-scale open-source energy system model for Europe, which can be used to evaluate the impact of different energy transition scenarios on the European energy system. The replication of the model in multimod + energyRt is intended as a by-product of an ongoing project with a goal of cross-validation and extension of the original model functionality to the project’s specific needs.

ReEDS in R

Exploratory replication of NREL’s ReEDS model in R with the aim to enhance model reuse, cross-model comparison, validation.

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