acept

ACEPT - Automated, communal energy planning tool

ACEPT is an open-source project that aims to provide an automated, communal energy planning tool. It allows users to model and analyze energy demand, supply, and distribution in a community or urban area. The tool takes into account factors such as building characteristics, regional data, and renewable energy sources to generate energy planning scenarios and evaluate their impact on sustainability and cost-effectiveness.

This is an Interdisciplinary Project (IDP) at the Chair of Renewable and Sustainable Energy Systems at TUM

For a detailed documentation of the project, please refer to the Documentation.

Features

The ACEPT project aims to automate the process of sourcing input data for the linear optimization framework urbs. Additionally, it was integrated into the GUI of pylovo, that allows a user to quickly visualize different grids and set parameters as well as results of the optimization of said grids.

acept provides support to create timeseries profiles as an input for urbs for...

• the typical weather for a location or area,
• the ambient temperature for a location or area,
• heat demand profiles for all buildings in a specified area and the area as a whole,
• solar profiles, that give the PV capacity factor for all buildings in a specified area,
• the Coefficient of Performance (COP) for heat pumps,
• ...

These timeseries contain hourly data for one year.

To calculate the heat demand profiles, acept leverages an upgraded version of the existing tool UrbanHeatPro.

Additionally, acept complements the existing data on buildings with additional knowledge because the available information on buildings is often incomplete, e.g. the postal code a building is in or its size.

Further information on the other projects that acept interacts with:

• urbs: Please refer to the urbs documentation, or find the project on GitHub.
• pylovo: Please refer to the pylovo documentation, or find the project on Gitlab LRZ.
• UrbanHeatPro: Check out the section on the UrbanHeatPro dependency in the documentation of acept.

Requirements

• Python 3.10

Installation

More details on how to install acept can be found in the Installation Guide in the Documentation.

TLDR: To install acept, follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository:

$ git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/VeraKowalczuk/acept.git

2. Navigate to the project directory:

$ cd acept

3. Setup and install the project

   • Linux & macOS: Use the setup script

     $ ./setup.sh

   • Windows: Follow the steps of the Installation Guide for Windows

The documentation provides further help if you have problems during the installation.

Additional requirements

For more information on the data setup, head to the data setup section of the documentation

src/acept/personal_settings.py

Place your Authorization Token for the Renewables.ninja API inside this file.

Your API token is displayed on your account page, where you can also generate a new random token in case your current token has been compromised.

The file should have the following structure:

renewables_token = 'your_token_here'

Weather data

ACEPT uses weather data from two sources:

• the Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD) project TRY (Test Reference Years)
• the PVGIS API

The DWD data has to be downloaded and setup locally while the PVGIS API does not need any downloads. Checkout the documentation for detailed information, when to use which data and how to set up the project to use your preferred data source.

Usage

Check out the acept.examples package or the Jupyter notebooks in the src/acept/acept_notebooks directory for examples on how to use the project.

Alternatively, acept can be used in the GUI of the pylovo project.

For more examples and usage instructions as well as details on the integration into the pylovo project, please refer to the Documentation.

Contributing

Contributions from the community are welcome. If you want to contribute to ACEPT, please follow these steps:

1. Fork the repository.
2. Create your feature branch

$ git checkout -b feature/my-feature

3. Make your changes and commit them (git commit -am 'Add my feature')

$ git commit -am 'Add my feature'

4. Push to the branch

$ git push origin feature/my-feature

5. Create a new Pull Request

The documentation also provides some ideas for further development of the project. You can use these ideas for inspiration.

License

ACEPT is open-source software licensed under the MIT License. Check out the LICENSE file for more information.