# PyPSA-Eur: An Open Optimisation Model of the European Transmission System¶

PyPSA-Eur is an open model dataset of the European power system at the transmission network level that covers the full ENTSO-E area.

It contains alternating current lines at and above 220 kV voltage level and all high voltage direct current lines, substations, an open database of conventional power plants, time series for electrical demand and variable renewable generator availability, and geographic potentials for the expansion of wind and solar power.

The model is suitable both for operational studies and generation and transmission expansion planning studies. The continental scope and highly resolved spatial scale enables a proper description of the long-range smoothing effects for renewable power generation and their varying resource availability.

The restriction to freely available and open data encourages the open exchange of model data developments and eases the comparison of model results. It provides a full, automated software pipeline to assemble the load-flow-ready model from the original datasets, which enables easy replacement and improvement of the individual parts.

PyPSA-Eur is designed to be imported into the open toolbox PyPSA for which documentation is available as well.

This project is currently maintained by the Department of Digital Transformation in Energy Systems at the Technische Universität Berlin. Previous versions were developed within the IAI at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and by the Renewable Energy Group at FIAS to carry out simulations for the CoNDyNet project, financed by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) as part of the Stromnetze Research Initiative.

A version of the model that adds building heating, transport and industry sectors to the model, as well as gas networks, is currently being developed in the PyPSA-Eur-Sec repository.

Getting Started

Configuration

Rules Overview

References

# Warnings¶

Please read the limitations section of the documentation and paper carefully before using the model. We do not recommend to use the full resolution network model for simulations. At high granularity the assignment of loads and generators to the nearest network node may not be a correct assumption, depending on the topology of the underlying distribution grid, and local grid bottlenecks may cause unrealistic load-shedding or generator curtailment. We recommend to cluster the network to a couple of hundred nodes to remove these local inconsistencies.

# Learning Energy System Modelling¶

If you are (relatively) new to energy system modelling and optimisation and plan to use PyPSA-Eur, the following resources are one way to get started in addition to reading this documentation.

• Documentation of PyPSA, the package for simulating and optimising modern power systems which PyPSA-Eur uses under the hood.
• Course on Energy System Modelling, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Dr. Tom Brown

# Citing PyPSA-Eur¶

If you use PyPSA-Eur for your research, we would appreciate it if you would cite the following paper:

@article{PyPSAEur,
author = "Jonas Hoersch and Fabian Hofmann and David Schlachtberger and Tom Brown",
title = "PyPSA-Eur: An open optimisation model of the European transmission system",
journal = "Energy Strategy Reviews",
volume = "22",
pages = "207 - 215",
year = "2018",
issn = "2211-467X",
doi = "10.1016/j.esr.2018.08.012",
eprint = "1806.01613"
}


If you want to cite a specific PyPSA-Eur version, each release of PyPSA-Eur is stored on Zenodo with a release-specific DOI. This can be found linked from the overall PyPSA-Eur Zenodo DOI:

# Pre-Built Networks as a Dataset¶

There are pre-built networks available as a dataset on Zenodo as well for every release of PyPSA-Eur.

The included .nc files are PyPSA network files which can be imported with PyPSA via:

import pypsa

filename = "elec_s_1024_ec.nc" # example
n = pypsa.Network(filename)


# Licence¶

PyPSA-Eur work is released under multiple licenses:

• All original source code is licensed as free software under MIT.
• Configuration files are mostly licensed under CC0-1.0.
• Data files are licensed under CC-BY-4.0.

See the individual files and the dep5 file for license details.

Additionally, different licenses and terms of use also apply to the various input data, which are summarised below. More details are included in the description of the data bundles on zenodo.

Files BY NC SA Mark Changes Detail
eez/* x x x   http://www.marineregions.org/disclaimer.php