Energy Systems Modelling

[Nuclear]

What are the models most commonly used to simulate an electricity grid and evaluate changes on the national scale? Models which simulate demand and the output of conventional and renewable energy facilities and determine the optimum electricity mix for a given set of objectives (say low-cost, low-carbon, or both).


I want to get away from limited "back of the envelope" calculations into more detailed modelling. Perhaps there's some freeware around which runs on Windows?

[anonposter]

I suspect the software is proprietary, either used by the grid operators or unpublished code by academics.

[Graham Palmer]

Look up these, but I dont' know whether you'll be able to download the software:

www.nrel.gov/analysis/reeds/
energy.plan.aau.dk

If you don't need to do millions of iterations, just use a spreadsheet and write your own VBA macros to run it (as I do), otherwise if you want to do a lot of iterations, you could try a language such as Python.

[Nuclear]

Thank you. I downloaded EnergyPlan. Seems to be a pretty straightforward tool to use.

Reeds doesn't seem to be publically available.