🐍🧑🏫💻This semester I taught a new course about Data Science for Energy System Modelling, for which I built a website with energy-focused Python tutorials:
It includes hands-on introductions to various libraries useful for modelling energy systems and processing data: Python, numpy, matplotlib, pandas, geopandas, cartopy, rasterio, atlite, networkx, pyomo, pypsa, plotly, hvplot, and streamlit.
Topics covered include:
- time series analysis (e.g. wind and solar, prices load)
- tabular geographical data (e.g. location of power plants, LNG terminals, industrial sites)
- converting reanalysis weather data to renewable generation (e.g. ERA5)
- land eligibility analysis (e.g. where to build wind turbines)
- working with maps and projections
- optimisation modelling
- electricity market modelling
- networks & linearised power flow
- capacity expansion planning
- sector-coupling
- (interactive) visualisation/dashboards
The following resources were super helpful, especially for the first part of the course:
Narrowly following least-cost energy system optimisation results risks inequitable outcomes.
In a paper on near-optimal trade-offs, I show for a renewable European power system that more regionally balanced expansion plans can be achieved at little extra cost below 4% ...
... and that completely autarkic solutions, without power transmission, appear much more costly.
Providing just a single least-cost solution underplays an immense degree of freedom when planning future energy systems.
There are many near-optimal alternatives with attractive properties like social acceptance due to less onshore wind capacity or limited grid reinforcement.
We systematically explored the decision space of a European power system model based on wind and solar that co-optimises generation, storage and grid infrastructure.
We look at how the capacities of each technology can deviate if the costs are epsilon % away from the optimum.