Open Source for supporting renewable energy and cost efficiency
openCEM is an open source (OS) Capacity Expansion Modeling (CEM) tool that is developed by ITP Renewables, and it allows energy system planners, decision-makers, regulators, and project developers to undertake comprehensive modeling to provide insights on how to transition electricity systems to low-carbon power. The Samoan government engaged ITP in 2023 through the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) to develop a version of openCEM for use by agencies in their long-term electricity sector planning.
How does openCEM help to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy?
South Pacific island countries face critical challenges under climate change: rising sea levels, and economic and energy security, and they rely heavily on diesel power, an expensive, environmentally damaging, and easily disrupted fuel source. For these countries to switch to renewables brings energy resilience, meaning the assurance that an entity such as a business or a town has a reliable, regular supply of energy and contingency measures in place in the event of a power failure, lower costs of electricity and goods, and ownership over a sustainable energy infrastructure for the long term. Moreover, a recent academic paper from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, the International Energy Agency, and SINTEF Energi AS, underlined the importance of CEM systems such as openCEM in understanding the potential role of H2 (Hydrogen) in renewable energy and thus making crucial informed investment decisions in Europe.
openCEM intends to democratise the discussion about renewables and the energy transition by providing an alternative to proprietary and expensive software packages currently in use for this purpose. The limited availability of capacity expansion tools to a wider audience prevents the questioning of the underlying assumptions of published modelling efforts, which may be biased towards a particular policy or technology.- Jose Zapata
openCEM enables users, whether experts or policymakers, to pose and answer key questions, such as: What is the least-cost pathway to achieving specific renewable energy or emission targets? Which emerging technologies hold the greatest potential to minimize costs and emissions, and are therefore most deserving of public support for accelerating research, development, and commercialisation? Furthermore, since it is OS it allows others to both use and improve it and facilitate knowledge sharing by building a community of interested researchers and practitioners.
OS projects help hinder the monopolistic power of software providers, which in turn have exerted substantial financial and political influence on government institutions. OS promotes the formation of collective opinions by a diverse and independent group of individuals, which can lead to better judgements from the “wisdom of the crowd” than those from single experts. - Jose Zapata
Finally, it can be used locally, but it does not need to be installed locally, because its newly developed feature openCEM Cloud, can make use of a web application for using openCEM. With it, users can upload scenarios, run them in the cloud, and visualise the results.
The two primary advantages of it being OS are transparency and affordability. Transparency, as there is no barrier to acquire and examine how exactly does a model work, and to ensure rigour and impartiality when it comes to modelling renewable energy futures and affordability since financial barriers are reduced for third parties to use the software and benefit from its intellectual property. Unfortunately this aspect is hindered since there is often insufficient financial support to make open source tools as user friendly as proprietary equivalents.- Jose Zapata
The licence
openCEM uses the GNU General Public License to ensure that the software remains free, allowing you to run it for any purpose, study and modify it to meet your needs, redistribute copies to help others, and share your modified versions, so the entire community can benefit from your contributions.
OpenCEM is publicly funded by the Australian public sector. As such, it was agreed from the outset that this would be an OS project. The GNU GPL was perceived at the time to be the source code counterpart to the Creative Commons license used for government reports. - Jose Zapata
For more on the OpenCEM click here.
For OpenCEM’s GitHub page click here
A sincere thanks to Jose Zapata the Principal of Modelling and Analytics of ITP renewables. Your support is greatly appreciated!
Sources:
https://itprenewables.com/projects/opencem-samoa/
https://munin.uit.no/handle/10037/36070?show=full
https://www.thoughtworks.com/clients/opencem
Picture taken from the ITP Renewables OpenCEM page