The Energy Transition Model

The Energy Transition Model (ETM) is an interactive tool for energy modeling. It allows you to create and explore scenario's for the energy future of various countries. The ETM brings the facts and tools to capture your vision for the future!

We are open source!

All functionality of the ETM can be used free of charge and the ETModel and ETEngine code (other repositories will follow shortly) are publicly available on GitHub under the MIT licence.

Parts of the ETM

The ETM consist of many parts, all with their own specific documentation and user manuals. The main goal of this document is to provide you with the information you are looking for. Whether you are a user, a contributer, an energy expert or a developer, the links below should get you started right away!

• Documentation for users: If you want to use the ETM for a workshop, a strategy session or for your own education.
• Documentation for contributers: If you want to change, extend, re-design or re-use any part of the ETM.

Documentation for users

The Energy Transition Model has three main interfaces:

• The Professional interface: over 300 sliders, 100+ charts and tables and much more. The starting point for a detailed energy scenario for various countries and end-years.
• The Energy Game: lets you explore the energy future of the Netherlands in a fun, visual way.
• The Energy Mixer: a questionaire type of interface that creates a scenario based on your answers. This interface is aimed more at non-technical people then the other interfaces.

From here on, we will focus on the professional interface.

The professional interface allows you to influence all the main aspects of the energy system:

• Targets: set goals for your scenario and see if you can reach them. Targets can be set for CO₂ reduction, renewability, total cost, max import etc.
• Demand: what happens to energy consumption in the future?
• Costs: specify what you think will happen to the costs of carriers and technologies. Setting the costs provides the canvas on which your scenario is painted. NOTE: these costs do not include taxes or subsidies and are, therefore, less dependent on governement influences than prices.
• Supply: which technologies will we use to produce heat and electricity in the future?

Basics of the Professional interface

Interacting with the ETM

You can interact with the ETM trough sliders:

Sliders can be moved by either

• dragging the slider itself (using the mouse)
• clicking the minus and plus signs that appear when the mouse hovers over a slider
• typing directly into the value box (click once on the value to activate)

You receive feedback about the changes your choices bring about through the dashboard and the charts. Both dashboard and charts can be changed to show the information that you are interested in.

Start-year and end-year

At any time, the ETM contains information about two scenarios:

• The start-scenario: this scenario is fixed and is used to calculate how much your choices for the future affect things like CO₂ emissions.
• The future scenario: this scenario is initially identical to the start-scenario but will reflect the changes you make in the ETM, using the sliders available. The philosophy of the ETM is: the future will be equal to the present, unless you change things. This is to make the effects of single measures really clear.

The energy calculation

Energy is the 'common currency' of the ETM. When you change a slider, you effectively change the energy flow in the ETM. This energy flow can be represented as a graph such as shown below:

The nodes are represented by converters who convert or transport energy (possibly with loss). The edges (the connections) are the energy flows which are characterized by volume (in megajoule) and carrier type (such as coal, electricity, useable_heat etc.).

The ETM is demand driven meaning that moving a slider in the demand sector, the graph is traverse from left to right. From 'useful demand' (heating, hot water, car-kilometers) to 'primary demand' (the extraction of gas, import of coal etc.)

More information on the calculation methods of the ETM can be found on our detailed documentation pages

Documentation for contributers

The Energy Transition Model consists of a centrally hosted computation engine that can be accessed by three web-interfaces and an API. The interfaces are

• The Energy Game hosted on github.com/quintel/etflex
• The Professional interface hosted on github.com/quintel/etmodel
• The Energy Mixer hosted on github.com/quintel/energymixer

Under the hood: Structure of the code

The different parts of the ETM can be schematically represented as shown below:

The user can interact with ETModel (through the professional interface), ETFlex (the game interface) and Mixer (the questionaire interface).

Where to start?

• Go to Start with data if you want to know what data or publications were used for the Energy Transition Model. Also if you are interested in improving the existing data or want to create your own country.
• Go to Start with code if you want to build on the ETM code.

Start with data

The dataflow of the ETM starts with the energy balance of a country (or a group of countries as in the EU version of the model). We currently use the IEA energy balances because they are available for all countries, in the same format and can be bought online. The energy balance is a matrix of numbers that describe the energy flows of a country broken down in carrier (along one axis) and sectors, applications etc (along the other axis)

Apart from the energy balance, the ETM needs information about the current state of affairs in the country you want to model in the ETM. Such information includes (amongst others) the number of inhabitants and the fraction of LED lamps. We call this type of information 'assumptions'.

The energy balance, together with the assumptions will be forged into a dataset that can initialize the ETM. This process is done in the Dataset Analysis which can be found in the ETDataset repository.

A different kind of assumptions we have made are the technical and financial parameters such as 'efficiency' or 'operating and maintenance costs' for all the technologies and energy carriers used in the model. Each technology's attributes are based on our research of publically available sources as much as possible. Most technological assumptions are not country-specific, but global. All these can also be found in the ETDataset repository.

For more information on where to find all this information, please refer to the specific documentation in the README.md located in the root directory. You will see this by scrolling down after clicking the link to the ETDataset repository.

Start with code

Depending on which part of the model you want to work on, the repositories that hold the relevant code are as folows:

• ETEngine: the computational engine. Contains all methods to traverse the energy graph, methods for interaction with the graph (e.g., gqueries) etc.
• ETModel: the front-end code, charts, translations.
• ETSource: gqueries, input-statements the data that defines the graph structure and content.
• Merit: stand-alone merit order calculator which is used as a gem by ETEngine.
• Atlas: functions to initialize the graph.
• Refinery: graph traversal algorithms used to initialize the graph. Refinery is used as a gem by Atlas.

Each repository has its own specific documentation in the README.md located in the root directory.

Quintel Intelligence

The people behind the ETM

The Energy Transition Model has been created by Quintel Intelligence. We are a small company with big ambitions when it comes to energy modeling. Our team consists of people from various disciplines who share a passion for energy.

Please have a look at our company website for more information.