Potentials of solar and wind power

This Snakemake workflow allows to estimate potentials of solar and wind power. We applied it in a former publication in which we estimated potentials for Europe as a whole, as well as all countries, sub-national regions, and municipalities in Europe (see below).

However, it can be used to generate potentials for different areas by modifying the configuration files (and likely some of the rules as well). If you want to use it for different areas, consider the workflow as a starting point for your own analysis, not as a generic library that will work out of the box.

Documentation and citation

The approach is described in the following publication. If you use data or the method, please cite this publication.

Tröndle, T., Pfenninger, S., Lilliestam, J., 2019. Home-made or imported: on the possibility for renewable electricity autarky on all scales in Europe. Energy Strategy Reviews 26. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2019.100388

Getting ready

Installation

The following dependencies are needed to set up an environment in which the analysis can be run and the paper be build:

• conda

When these dependencies are installed, you can create a conda environment from within you can run the analysis:

conda env create -f environment.yaml

Don't forget to activate the environment. To see what you can do now, run:

snakemake --list

Data to be retrieved manually

Whenever possible, data is downloaded automatically. As this is not always possible, you will need to retrieve the following data sets manually:

• European Settlement Map 2012, Release 2017, 100m, to be placed at ./data/esm-100m-2017/
• World Exclusive Economic Zones v10, to be placed in ./data/World_EEZ_v10_20180221
• capacity factors from renewable.ninja, to be placed in ./data/capacityfactors/{technology}.nc for technology in ["wind-onshore", "wind-offshore", "rooftop-pv", "open-field-pv"] (where "open-field-pv" and "rooftop-pv" can be the same dataset and hence can be linked instead of copied)(to run simulations, see Manual steps below)

Run the analysis

snakemake --use-conda

This will run all analysis steps to estimate potentials.

You can also run certain parts only by using other snakemake rules; to get a list of all rules run snakemake --list.

To generate a PDF of the dependency graph of all steps, run:

snakemake --rulegraph | dot -Tpdf > dag.pdf

(needs dot: conda install graphviz).

Run on Euler cluster

To run on Euler, use the following command:

snakemake --use-conda --profile config/euler

If you want to run on another cluster, read snakemake's documentation on cluster execution and take config/euler as a starting point.

Manual steps

At the moment, there is one manual step involved: running renewables.ninja simulations of wind and solar electricity. It is added to the automatic workflow as input data. Should you want to change the simulations, because you want to change parameters of the simulation (see parameters.ninja in the config), you can do that in three steps:

1. Create input files by first changing the config, then running snakemake -s rules/ninja-input.smk.
2. Run the simulations on renewables.ninja.
3. Update the data in data/capacityfactors/{technology}.

Run the tests

snakemake --use-conda test

Repo structure

• src: contains the Python source code
• tests: contains the test code
• config: configurations used in the study
• rules: additional Snakemake rules and workflows
• data: place for raw data, whether retrieved manually and automatically
• build: will contain all results (does not exist initially)

License

The code in this repo is MIT licensed, see ./LICENSE.md.