Open source toolbox for modelling integrated energy systems

Project Information

Spine

Grant agreement ID: 774629

DOI

10.3030/774629

Project closed

EC signature date 30 August 2017

Start date 1 October 2017

End date 30 September 2021

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Secure, clean and efficient energy

Total cost

€ 3 729 987,50

EU contribution

€ 3 580 418,75

Coordinated by

TEKNOLOGIAN TUTKIMUSKESKUS VTT OY
Finland

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - Spine (Open source toolbox for modelling integrated energy systems)

Reporting period: 2020-04-01 to 2021-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Secure and affordable energy production is critical for modern societies, but energy production is also responsible for a large portion of the greenhouse gas emissions in Europe. Wind power and solar power can produce energy without on-site emissions, but they are variable sources of electricity. Consequently, there is a pressing need to better understand how that variable electricity can replace fossil fuel based energy generation in all sectors of economy. That analysis can be improved with new kinds of tools where different energy sectors (power, heating, cooling, industries, and transport) are analyzed together.

The main objective of the Spine project is to develop and validate an end-to-end energy modelling toolbox that will enable open, practical, flexible and realistic planning of future European energy grids. The Spine Toolbox will have partially automated data retrieval and validation of both input and output data, enabling users to focus on core modelling tasks. The Spine Model’s flexibility in terms of temporal, geographical, technological and sectoral dimensions will allow integrated analyses in several levels of the energy grids. These features will make Spine Toolbox state-of-the-art in energy system modelling, and allow grid operators, energy producers and researchers to carry out analyses that are not possible with current modelling systems. The project was able to achieve the main objective.

The project was further divided into following specific objectives, that were also achieved:
O1) Develop tools and methods for documented and replicable data acquisition
O2) Develop a highly adaptable energy system optimization model
O3) Develop a method to generate and manage a large number of scenarios
O4) Develop an adaptable interface for external models and tools
O5) Develop an interface for the parallelization of optimization tasks
O6) Improve, validate and deploy the Spine Toolbox together with the industry in 13 case studies
O7) Initiate, grow and support a user community for the deployment and future development

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The project had two main software outcomes: Spine Toolbox modelling workflow manager and the energy systems model SpineOpt. They fulfil the objectives set for the project and both of them are state-of-the-art tools for their respective purposes. Their qualifications have been detailed in the submitted manuscripts available from: http://www.spine-model.org/publications.htm. Both tools are available for download as open source (https://github.com/Spine-project). Spine project has also built data processing tools for meteorological data and for power systems data. They are available as plug-ins for Spine Toolbox and also as independent GitHub repositories.

The case studies have also been performed. Their main goal was to facilitate the tool development. Now, after the project, all case studies are available and can be useful starting points for new modellers trying out the Spine tools. They are available as Spine Toolbox projects in the Spine project repositories: https://github.com/orgs/Spine-project/repositories.

Spine project’s main ways of communication and dissemination have been the project website, presentations and discussions in different events, social media profiles, in particular Twitter, ResearchGate, LinkedIn and GitHub where Spine has a satisfactory following (127 in Twitter, 113 in ResearchGate and 77 in LinkedIn). Spine project, its progress and results have been actively presented at various scientific and other events.

Newsletters describing the project results and the project team have been published twice on the project website and social media channels. In addition, the project has a YouTube channel where videos demonstrating the use of the Spine modelling system have been published during the project. In addition, presentations from the four webinars held in September 2021 have been published there. Progress on the project’s communication and dissemination has been reported and monitored throughout the project. Furthermore, specific key performance indicators were set in the project plan. These were presented above in the Section 1.3 Impact.

The project plan stated that the project would organize five different events, where Spine project and its results would be presented to at least 80 persons who are not involved in the project. This target was easily achieved, as the project organized two live workshops in 2018 and 2019, one webinar in 2020 and four webinars in September 2021. The attendance of the webinar series was very good, with each webinar having 80-140 registrees, 24-73 online participants, and 47-78 YouTube views during the first week after the webinars (presently the views are 80-250 per webinar). Most participants were researchers and modellers, but also private companies, transmission system operators, and consultants. The discussion during the webinars was active with a lot of questions, especially on the technical details and specific problems which highlighted the modelling expertise of the participants.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Ever improving computational capability is making previously computationally unfeasible models attainable. Consequently, a better temporal representation is now possible for a full energy system model. However, it is very easy to increase the problem dimensions to the extent that the model becomes computationally infeasible especially in large geographical footprint such as Europe. What is needed is a tool where different levels of representation in temporal, spatial and technological dimensions can be easily achieved. In this way, it will be possible to seek the least harmful trade-offs between accuracy and computational resource use. Also, the model should be scalable in order to utilize supercomputers once the data, model and scenarios are mature enough for the purpose. To our knowledge such flexibility and scalability is not present in existing energy system models, let alone in open source energy system models.

Now, at the end of the project, Spine Toolbox and Spine Model are advanced tools for energy systems modelling with a growing community of developers and users. The new tools allow addressing energy related challenges at a new level of fidelity and efficiency. The case studies that will be performed in the Spine project shed light on some of the pressing concerns related to climate targets, energy markets, system stability and power grid planning, as well as integration of wind and solar power. They also act as a starting point for new modellers starting to use the Spine tools.

An example of a data view from Spine Toolbox

Spine work package structure