An open source hourly zero carbon energy system model

2015-02-06 01:05:00 +00002015-02-06 01:05:00 +0000 Trystan Lea
1 minute reading time

sustainability

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I've been doing some work recently with Philip James from the Centre for Alternative Technology on developing a set of open source zero carbon energy system models based on ZeroCarbonBritain that visualise in a javascript based web page application how energy demand can be supplied by a variable renewable energy supply using a mix of storage technologies. You can create your own scenarios, choosing how much wind, solar, storage technologies etc are used.

Its still work in progress but the models we have built so far are now online and can be explored here:
http://zerocarbonbritain.org/energy_model

The source code is all available there too as well as the original ZeroCarbonBritain spreadsheet model: https://github.com/philJam/energymodel

Visualising hourly surplus and shortfall:

Visualising battery, hydrogen, synthetic liquid and gas store levels:

This builds partly on findings and questions raised from our earlier work on the Snowdonia household energy study: here;http://openenergymonitor.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/snowdonia-household-energy-study.html

The aim will be to extend that analysis to look at the amount of renewable energy and energy storage required to supply the energy demand after implementing measures like building insulation/retrofit, heatpumps and electric transport.

I find it very interesting looking at how all of these different elements can come together to create a zero carbon energy system, to understand better the relevance of different solutions. With a framework like this it becomes more possible to put ideas like smart electric car charging or excess pv diversion to immersion heaters and battery stores in context, to get a better idea of actually how much effect different solutions can have. To engage in discussion regarding this post, please post on our Community Forum.