Assessing the Feasibility of Smart Local Energy Systems Modelling Projects

Open source software that’s poised to make a real impact - this is the ethos of CCG (Climate Compatible Growth) Research who have been investigating ways to improve the accessibility of computational tools for modelling energy and transport infrastructure. We’re grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with this group, in which we’ve been helping to provide a research software perspective within the grant application process.

OPEN (the Open Platform for Energy Networks) is one such project: a energy network demand simulator library, for modelling and optimising smart local energy systems. It serves to support the modelling of energy markets, power flow, and optimisation energy resource scheduling through its Python interface. It has a published paper detailing its operation!

The network editor UI design draft

With the aim of improving accessibility of the tool, we’ve considered the impact of the creation of a GUI, enabling non-specialists to model their own energy grids and draw new conclusions. Through calls with the existing team and potential users alike, we worked to capture and distill the requirements of the OPEN UI, producing high definition design documents and code architecture reports to guide the ongoing development.

Summary of options, broken down into developmental stages

To ensure that the development work is done for a reasonable rate, we utilised our freelance pool to estimate the costing of each individual stage, including the complete set of conclusions in a Feasibility Study Report.

With a well-developed library already in place, OPEN stands to be able to make a real impact in the world of energy systems modelling. We’ve really enjoyed working closely with this group, and look forward to providing further research software perspective to grant applications.