PyPSA-FES: A Linear Optimisation Model to Simulate Great Britain’s Energy Transition#
PyPSA-FES is an open model of the Great Britain Power System to simulate Future Energy Scenarios (FES) from National Grid ESO. The model includes options to include different domestic demand flexibility options, in particular Demand Flexibility Service-style events, electric vehicles with or without vehicle-to-grid, and heat pumps.
The model is an adaptation of PyPSA-Eur, a highly popular open-source European energy system model, developed at Technical University of Berlin.
Modelling the GB Electricity System#
Our modelling of the power system directly uses the data pipeline of the underlying PyPSA-Eur model. 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, geographic potentials for the expansion of wind and solar power.
We model Great Britain in 16 zones chosen to capture bottlenecks in the transmission network. For demand, we take yearly profiles from ENTSO-E, scaled to estimated yearly total demands.
The model formulation lends itself both to operational studies and generation and transmission expansion planning studies.
Future Energy Scenarios#
To model future years, we draw on the predicted energy transition scenarios created by national grid ESO, Future Energy Scenarios (FES). These provide different sector-coupled pathways to net-zero emissions by 2050, lining out (among two others) one optimistic, Leading the Way, and one more conservative, Falling Short scenario. These two are included in our model.
To accomodate both the cost-optimisation backbone of our model, but also the fixed quantities that define the scenarios, we fix all capacities in the model that can be loosely defined as targets, and leave it to the model to optimize the quantities that are required to balance the system around them.
For instance, we fix the total installed capacity of wind and solar power (just the overall capacity, the model decides how to distribute it), the total yearly emission targets, and rollout for flexibility providing infrastructure, like electric vehicles and heat pumps.
The Future Energy Scenarios consider a sector-coupled version of the energy system, and aims at achieving net-zero emissions within the next decades. Due to the electrification of the transport and heating sectors, negative emissions targeted in the easy-to-abate electricity sector, and fuel competition with other sectors, for instance with biomass, the constraints imposed by integration in the larger system are included in the model.
The Origin Model PyPSA-Eur#
PyPSA-Eur a sector-coupled energy system covering the whole of Europe which was adapted to build the present model. For a great overview of the respective capabilities we refer to the model’s documentation or the Github repository.
Warning
PyPSA-FES is under active development and has several limitations which you should understand before using the model. In case questions arise, please reach out to lukas.franken@ed.ac.uk.
This project is currently maintained by Centre for Net Zero of Octopus Energy in London.
Workflow#
Note
The graph above was generated using
snakemake --rulegraph -F | sed -n "/digraph/,/}/p" | dot -Tpng -o workflow.png
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 modelling energy systems which PyPSA-Eur uses under the hood.
Course on Energy Systems given at Technical University of Berlin by Prof. Dr. Tom Brown.
Course on Data Science for Energy System Modelling given at Technical University of Berlin by Dr. Fabian Neumann.