Software Projects

SOFTWARE PyPSA - free software toolbox for simulating and optimising modern power systems

The Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS) has developed a free software toolbox for simulating and optimising modern power systems that include features such as variable wind and solar generation, storage units, sector coupling and mixed alternating and direct current networks.
The tool box is called PyPSA - "Python for Power System Analysis". It is pronounced "pipes-ah".
PyPSA was initially developed by the Renewable Energy Group at FIAS to carry out simulations for the CoNDyNet project. It is designed to scale well with large networks and long time series.

Further information about the toolbox can be found here: https://github.com/FRESNA/PyPSA
Documentation as PDF: http://www.pypsa.org/doc/PyPSA.pdf

Screenshots:

Web Application for the Interactive Simulation of Power Grid Dynamics

The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) has developed this web application as a showcase of complex power grid dynamics, where users can select various model parameters and immediately visualise - respectively interact with - the live simulation.

It has been designed in context of the Long Night of the Sciences to demonstrate complex dynamic phenomena in power grids and has an interface for users to experiment with the model. So far, the interface is not aimed at unexperienced users, i.e. undergraduate physics is necessary for understanding the model. Hence we suggest that "experts" assist the experiments and offer detailed explanations. We are currently working on a version that is accessible on the level of high-school physics and can be used in school for teaching purposes.

The web application can be found here: http://www.condynet.de/interaktiv. It requires JavaScript to run.

The latest version is available at https://github.com/bodograumann/powergrid-dynamics-simulation.

Screenshot:


DATABASE 'powerplantmatching' - toolset for cleaning, standardizing and combining multiple power plant databases

The toolset helps with simplifying the data collection of power plants. Information on power plants, particularly European ones is scattered over a few different projects and databases that are introducing their own different standards. Thus, it firstly provides functions to vertically clean databases and convert them into one coherent standard, which does not distinguish the units of a power plant. Secondly, it provides functions to horizontally merge different databases in order to check their consistency and improve the reliability.

powerplantmatching was initially developed by the Renewable Energy Group at (FIAS) to build power plant data inputs to PyPSA-based models for carrying out simulations for the CoNDyNet project.

Further information about the toolset can be found here: https://github.com/FRESNA/powerplantmatching

Screenshot: