renpass – Renewable Energy Pathways Simulation System

Themenfeld

Systemintegration und -simulation

Kurzbeschreibung

renpass ist ein Simulationsmodell für die Stromversorgung in Deutschland und Europa mit hoher zeitlicher und regionaler Auflösung. Es eignet sich für die mittel- und langfristige Analyse der nachhaltigen Transformationen im Stromsektor. renpass wird getrieben von der nicht-regelbaren Einspeisung erneuerbarer Energieträger und der Stromnachfrage (Netzlast). Das Modell wird als "Open Source" Modell frei verbreitet.

Die Erfahrungen mit renpass sind in die Entwicklung von oemof eingeflossen.

Description

renpass (Renewable Energy Pathways Simulation System) is an open source simulation energy model (published under GNU GPL 3 opensource.org/licenses/GPL-3.0) which has the goal to fulfil the requirements of full transparency and the possibility to image 100% renewable energy systems as well as today's system on a high regional and time resolution.

AIM
- Techno-Economic Simulation of 100 % renewable energy systems and pathways
- Comparability, transparency and reliability of assumptions for credibility
- Dependency on the active participation of the users
- Retrievability of mistakes in the calculation and data
- Making gaps in data availability obvious
- Modular Setting to combine expert knowledge of different areas

FUNCTIONALITY
The installed capacities and expansion pathways of the different energy sources are set exogenously for the period to be analysed. For each time step, the production of wind, solar and run-of-river electricity is subtracted from the demand. The so-called residual load is then supplied by the least expensive combination of the fully controllable production plants, storage units and grid utilisation. The utilisation of controllable capacity in renpass is based on regional dispatch in each grid region followed by balancing between the regions within the limits of the grid capacity. More explanation can be found in the renpass manual.

SOFTWARE AND LICENSE
All software is open source software and publicly available. renpass is published under GNU General Public License 3 (http://opensource.org/licenses/GPL-3.0)
The license guarantees you the freedoms to use, study, share (copy), and modify the software. It is a copyleft license, which means that you can distribute derived works only under the same license terms.

CONTRIBUTION
Please report any bugs you can find. renpass is in a dynamic process of extensions and changes. If you want to help to improve this model by finding bugs and to broaden renpass by adding new code pieces, better data, more clever algorithms, or other improvements, you are very welcome!

NEED FOR TRANSPARENCY
Fundamental changes of the energy system like a transition to a 100 % renewable energy supply need an extremely high acceptance of the general public. The necessity of new production, transmission and storage facilities can only be analysed by highly complex analytical models, which usually are proprietary. In general it is not transparent how the results are derived. For the advancement of science as well as for the development of public trust in the modelling results, it is necessary that energy models are not developed and used in parallel isolation or even deliberately closed off. On the contrary they need to be transparent and openly available.

OPEN DATA AND OPEN SOURCE IN ENERGY SYSTEM MODELING
The role of open data and open source as an approach to meet challenges in energy modeling as well as the model renpass is further described in the doctoral thesis which you can find in the .zip-file.


Installation

renpass is written in the programming language R. Pathway assumptions, data and results are stored in a MySQL-database.
You can find :
- manual for the installation of R and MySQL
- manual for renpass
- code of renpass
- databases of renpass
in the zip-file below.


Please send an e-mail to Frauke if you have problems with the installation.

renpass Installation

renpass

29.11.2016 368 MB (ZIP)

all you need for the installation

Download

Projektbezogene Publikationen

  • Gesine Bökenkamp: The role of Norwegian hydro storage in future renewable electricity supply systems in Germany (Prof. Olav Hohmeyer)
  • Frauke Wiese: renpass (Renewable Energy Pathways Simulation System): An open source model for the simulation of pathways of the Energiewende in Germany and Europe (Prof. Olav Hohmeyer)

Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeiter