Energy System Modelling, Summer Semester 2020
Table of Contents
- 1. Course Details
- 2. Lecture Slides and Recorded Videos
- 3. Tutorial exercises
- 4. Previous Energy System Modelling Lecture Courses (with all slides and other material)
- 5. Master Thesis Opportunities
- 6. Oral Exam
- 7. Course Links
- 7.1. General links
- 7.2. 2020 Energy News
- 7.3. How Solar Got Cheap
- 7.4. Rossby waves in atmosphere cause weekly/synoptic variations
- 7.5. Coordinated Expansion Planning: Status and Research Challenges
- 7.6. Critique of highly-renewable modelling exercises with response
- 7.7. Papers from the 1970s already foresaw many of the design issues with highly-renewable energy systems
- 7.8. German residential electricity prices compared to other European countries
- 7.9. Climate change will affect wind and solar feed-in and correlation length
- 7.10. Spectral analysis of Laplacian
- 7.11. Lecture series on Convex Relaxations in Power System Optimization from LANL ANSI
- 7.12. Paper on sensitivity to cost parameters (and weather and some policy levers)
- 7.13. Paper: Small-scale granular technologies accelerate the decarbonisation
- 7.14. Natural gas storage capacities in Europe
- 7.15. Network development plans in Germany
- 7.16. Great Britain electricity demand surges during World Cup
- 7.17. 2000-2001 California Electricity Crisis
- 7.18. Market manipulation in Germany 2005-6
- 7.19. Debate: networks versus storage
- 7.20. Net-zero emissions in all energy sectors
- 7.21. Strommarkttreffen
- 7.22. Agora Energiewende Jahresrückblick
- 7.23. Politics of discount rates (with otters!)
- 7.24. Bundesnetzagentur Monitoringbericht (also in English as Monitoring Report)
- 7.25. Battery Electric Vehicles
WARNING: This is an old course, please see the teaching page for the latest courses.
1 Course Details
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Faculty of Informatics
Block lecture
WARNING: Due to the novel corona virus, this lecture will be taking place only online.
Instead of lectures on Campus Nord, lectures will be pre-recorded and released as video along with the slides. There will be a live Question and Answer (Q&A) session on MS Teams for each day's worth of lectures, followed by a live Tutorial on MS Teams.
On each day the programme will be:
| start | end | activity |
|---|---|---|
| 10:00 | 12:00 | Live Q&A on lectures on MS Teams (please watch the lectures for this day BEFOREHAND) |
| 13:00 | 14:30 | Live Tutorial on MS Teams (please work through the exercises for this day BEFOREHAND) |
Dates:
| day | date | lectures uploaded here by date |
|---|---|---|
| Thu | 04.06.2020 | 21.05.2020 |
| Fri | 05.06.2020 | 29.05.2020 |
| Fri | 19.06.2020 | 05.06.2020 |
| Thu | 25.06.2020 | 11.06.2020 |
| Fri | 26.06.2020 | 19.06.2020 |
Location: MS Teams (link updated 03.06.2020)
Language: English
Course number: 2400230
Some of the exercises will require you to program in Python, so please bring a laptop. If you don't know Python, please do a tutorial for the basics. We will help you to install the requisite libraries.
The course has 4 ECTS points.
SWS: 2
2 Lecture Slides and Recorded Videos
The lectures are given by Tom Brown.
Please watch the three lectures for each day before the Q&A session.
You can right-click to download the videos, or just play them directly from the browser.
The LaTeX source is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License in the ESM GitHub repository. Here you can also track updates to the slides. The graphics are available in a compressed archive file.
2.1 Day 1 (Q&A on Thu 04.06.2020)
| slides | uploaded | updated | video | length | uploaded | updated | lecture topic |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lecture 1 Slides | 20.05.2020 | 04.06.2020 | Lecture 1 Video | 01:36:32 | 20.05.2020 | Introduction to energy system modelling | |
| Lecture 2 Slides | 20.05.2020 | Lecture 2 Video | 01:07:31 | 20.05.2020 | Consumption, Generation and Time series analysis for Germany | ||
| Lecture 3 Slides | 20.05.2020 | 26.05.2020 | Lecture 3 Video | 01:21:09 | 20.05.2020 | Renewables in Germany versus Europe, Balancing Energy/Capacity, Graph Theory, Linear Power Flow |
2.2 Day 2 (Q&A on Fri 05.06.2020)
| slides | uploaded | updated | video | length | uploaded | updated | lecture topic |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lecture 4 Slides | 26.05.2020 | Lecture 4 Video | 01:34:47 | 26.05.2020 | Power flow theory and solutions | ||
| Lecture 5 Slides | 27.05.2020 | 05.06.2020 | Lecture 5 Video | 01:02:04 | 27.05.2020 | Storage modelling, demand-side management (briefly) | |
| Lecture 6 Slides | 28.05.2020 | Lecture 6 Video | 01:08:43 | 28.05.2020 | Optimisation, KKT conditions |
2.3 Day 3 (Q&A on Fri 19.06.2020)
| slides | uploaded | updated | video | length | uploaded | updated | lecture topic |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lecture 7 Slides | 04.06.2020 | 28.06.2020 | Lecture 7 Video | 01:08:05 | 04.06.2020 | Introduction to electricity markets | |
| Lecture 8 Slides | 05.06.2020 | 22.07.2020 | Lecture 8 Video | 01:21:40 | 05.06.2020 | Optimisation and markets with networks and storage | |
| Lecture 9 Slides | 06.06.2020 | Lecture 9 Video | 00:56:45 | 06.06.2020 | Investment in dispatchable generation, screening curves, investment in transmission |
2.4 Day 4 (Q&A on Thu 25.06.2020)
| slides | uploaded | updated | video | length | uploaded | updated | lecture topic |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lecture 10 Slides | 09.06.2020 | 28.06.2020 | Lecture 10 Video | 01:16:36 | 09.06.2020 | Cost recovery from market, renewables in electricity markets, high shares of wind and solar, network versus storage optimisation | |
| Lecture 11 Slides | 09.06.2020 | Lecture 11 Video | 01:27:08 | 09.06.2020 | Discounting, net present value (NPV Jupyter notebook and as webpage), LCOE, multi-horizon investment, learning curves, path dependency (multi-horizon Jupyter notebook and as webpage) | ||
| Lecture 12 Slides | 10.06.2020 | Lecture 12 Video | 01:47:24 | 10.06.2020 | 23.06.2020 | Sector coupling, heat in buildings, transport, industry, synthetic fuels, open energy modelling |
2.5 Day 5 (Q&A on Fri 26.06.2020)
| slides | uploaded | updated | video | length | uploaded | updated | lecture topic |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lecture 13 Slides | 17.06.2020 | Lecture 13 Video | 01:10:18 | 17.06.2020 | Workflow management with Snakemake, spatial resolution in optimization models, optimal power flow formulations using graph cycles | ||
| *Lecture 14 Slides | 17.06.2020 | *Lecture 14 Video | 00:27:09 | 17.06.2020 | Principal Component Analysis (PCA) applied to the power system | ||
| *Lecture 15 Slides | 18.06.2020 | *Lecture 15 Video | 00:29:37 | 18.06.2020 | Flow allocation of network flows to generators and consumers | ||
| Lecture 16 Slides | 19.06.2020 | Lecture 16 Video | 00:56:12 | 19.06.2020 | Problems with optimization models, robustness to weather and climate change, near-optimal energy systems |
*material will not appear in the exam
3 Tutorial exercises
The tutorial question sheets, data, code examples and other instructions can be downloaded here: esm tutorials.
Please work through the exercise sheets before the tutorial sessions.
4 Previous Energy System Modelling Lecture Courses (with all slides and other material)
5 Master Thesis Opportunities
There are currently openings in our group to write a master thesis.
6 Oral Exam
The dates for the oral exam can be found in this timetable.
For orientation: Sample Exam Questions.
The location will be KIT Campus South, Building 07.07 (Vincenz-Prießnitz-Str. 1), 2nd Floor, Room 203.
7 Course Links
7.1 General links
energy-charts.de: Electricity dispatch in Germany
electricityMap.org: Live CO2 emissions in electricity from across the world
EPEXSPOT: Spot market bidding curves for Germany-Austria
OECD: A survey of key technological innovations for the low-carbon economy
model.energy: time series and simple energy system for any location in world
Clean Energy Wire: News on Energy Transition with Germany focus
7.2 2020 Energy News
Clean Energy Wire: News on Energy Transition with Germany focus
Official analysis of power system behaviour during Pan India Lights Off Event on 05.04.2020
04.06.2020: German pandemic stimulus package reduces EEG surcharge, doubles subsidies for electric vehicles, funds charging stations and public transport
04.06.2020: Analysis of stimulus package from energy perspective
04.06.2020: Big order for low-cost electrolysers for NEL at 350 USD/kW (Norway had large-scale electrolysers in 1929 already for ammonia for fertiliser)
09.06.2020: UK goes 2 months without coal-generated electricity
10.06.2020: German national hydrogen strategy in German
17.06.2020: German hydrogen strategy in English, analysis from CLEW
18.06.2020: Europe's draft hydrogen strategy leaked
25.06.2020: Blocking weather event causes extreme heat in Siberia
7.3 How Solar Got Cheap
Book by Greg Nemet covers the different phases and policy measures that made solar PV cheap.
See also his 2005 article Beyond the learning curve: factors influencing cost reductions in photovoltaics.
7.4 Rossby waves in atmosphere cause weekly/synoptic variations
Rossby waves in atmosphere cause the periodic weather systems that cause weekly wind variations.
Rossby waves can also be seen in Jupiter's atmosphere.
Explanation of blocking weather events covers Rossby waves too with nice videos and links to recent weather events.
7.5 Coordinated Expansion Planning: Status and Research Challenges
A great summary from EPRI in December 2019 on current challenges in modelling coordinated planning of energy systems.
7.6 Critique of highly-renewable modelling exercises with response
7.7 Papers from the 1970s already foresaw many of the design issues with highly-renewable energy systems
7.8 German residential electricity prices compared to other European countries
7.9 Climate change will affect wind and solar feed-in and correlation length
7.10 Spectral analysis of Laplacian
The eigenvectors of the Laplacian with zero eigenvalue tell you about its connectedness.
There is information in the other eigenvalues and eigenvectors too.
The smallest non-zero eigenvalue (Fiedler eigenvalue) and eigenvector tell you about the algebraic connectivity of the graph.
7.11 Lecture series on Convex Relaxations in Power System Optimization from LANL ANSI
7.12 Paper on sensitivity to cost parameters (and weather and some policy levers)
7.13 Paper: Small-scale granular technologies accelerate the decarbonisation
7.14 Natural gas storage capacities in Europe
7.15 Network development plans in Germany
7.16 Great Britain electricity demand surges during World Cup
7.17 2000-2001 California Electricity Crisis
7.18 Market manipulation in Germany 2005-6
7.19 Debate: networks versus storage
7.20 Net-zero emissions in all energy sectors
See the recent review paper Net-zero emissions energy systems in Science.