Learning materials

PyPSA meets Earth builds on top of several open-source packages, which are here recalled together with recommended sources to learn them from scratch.

YouTube Tutorials

We host training and presentation videos about PyPSA ecosystem tools made for users, developers and interested people.

• Training playlist

• Presentation playlist

• Youtube channel

PyPSA Introduction (essential)

• Watch how PyPSA-Eur is designed (1h)

• Watch and put your hands on to make PyPSA-Eur work on your computer (1-3h)

• While watching these PyPSA videos always have a look into the excellent PyPSA-Eur documentation

• To see what data we can extract we work usually closely with the basic PyPSA documentation

• Follow the PyPSA-Earth hackathon. Check the videos from this Youtube series since it explains and applies partially the hackathon material.

Data science basics (essential)

• Fabian Neumann just shared with the world the possibly best training material for “Data Science for Energy System Modelling”. This is a free multi-week course preparing you for all you need for PyPSA-Earth.

• Refresh your Python knowledge by watching CSDojo’s playlist. His content is excellent as introduction. You will learn in effective short videos the python basics such as variables If/else statements, functions, lists, for loops, while loops, dictionaries, classes and objects, boolean, list comprehensions, sets - put your hands on and write some test scripts as the video suggests. (~3h)

• Familiarize yourself with numpy and panda dataframes. In the Python-based PyPSA tool, we do not work with Excel. Powerful panda dataframes are our friends. Here is an extensive 30h course that provides a great introduction if this is completely unfamiliar to you.

• Introduction to Unix-shell - “Use of the shell is fundamental to a wide range of advanced computing tasks, including high-performance computing and automated workflow. These lessons will introduce you to this powerful tool.” (optional 4h, to become a pro)

Git and GitHub

For code collaboration we use GitHub. Which is a common source control tool that is a very popular collaborative code development tool. Here some notes if you are not already familiar with it:

• Git and GitHub is not the same. Usually, you work with git on your computer (offline) to push changes to GitHub (online).

• Here a great intro which we recommend

• Learning by doing. Maybe one of the best ways to learn is to puts your hands on open a GitHub repository and upload/change/reverse files from your local computer on some dummy scripts.

• This cheatsheet might help using the Git commands

Snakemake and advanced changes

Snakemake is our brain in PyPSA. It automates many tasks & keeps the code structure clean. Therefore, it is quite useful to learn if your task is to integrate features into PyPSA. We can recommend:

• snakemake basic and advanced tutorial here (takes max 3-5h and makes a lot of fun).

• Explore how PyPSA uses snakemake in the Snakefile and scripts - the GitHub search function is your best friend to find quickly what interests you.

Code environment

We can recommend setting up VScode from Microsoft. Add some extension if you like as described in this video. For instance GitHub, Gitlense, and maybe some others.

Note: if you decide to use Visual Studio Code, check out the tutorial about how to use Git and Github in Visual Studio Code