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Short tutorial

Short tutorial#

The installation procedure installs PyPSA-Earth model with all the software dependencies needed to build and run it. To properly model any region of the Earth, it is first crucial to get familiar with a tutorial where a simpler model is considered. This section explains how to run and analyze the tutorial model.

Build the tutorial model#

The user can explore the majority of the model’s functions on a local machine by running the tutorial, which uses fewer computational resources than the entire model does. A tutorial data kit was developed to facilitate exploring the model. You can build it using the tutorial configuration file config.tutorial.yaml (placed in the project folder pypsa-earth). By default, PyPSA-Earth reads configuration parameters of simulation from config.yaml file located in pypsa-earth folder. Thus, to run the tutorial model, config.tutorial.yaml needs to be stored as config.yaml:

.../pypsa-earth (pypsa-earth) % cp config.tutorial.yaml config.yaml

Note

You may want to do a reserve copy of your current configuration file (config.yaml) as it will be overwritten by a tutorial configuration.

In the configuration file config.yaml there is a flag retrieve_databundle which triggers data loading and a tutorial flag which determines that the loaded data belong to the tutorial kit. Currently the tutorial can be run only for Nigeria (“NG”), Benin (“BJ”), Botswana (“BW”) and Morocco (“MA”).

tutorial: true
...
enable:
    retrieve_databundle: true

It’s recommended to set retrieve_databundle: true when building the model for the first time to download all needed common data files. When the first run is completed and all the necessary data are extracted, it may be a good idea to set retrieve_databundle: false to avoid data loss.

Run the model#

After configuration set-up, the model is ready to be built and run. Before to actually run the workflow you may check how it will look by using –dryrun or -n Snakemake option:

.../pypsa-earth (pypsa-earth) % snakemake -j 1 solve_all_networks --dryrun

To run the whole modeling workflow you just need the following command:

.../pypsa-earth (pypsa-earth) % snakemake -j 1 solve_all_networks

This command will trigger loading of the whole dataset needed to build the model for a tutorial case if both tutorial and retrieve_databundle flags are on. The tutorial model will run simulation of power systems in Nigeria and Benin. Note that data load will need about 1.6Gb and model building will take a while (about 20..50 minutes).

Analyse the solved networks#

The solved networks can be analysed just like any other PyPSA network (e.g. in Jupyter Notebooks).

import pypsa

network = pypsa.Network("results/networks/elec_s_6_ec_lcopt_Co2L-4H.nc")

The video below shows how to analyse solved PyPSA-Eur networks in Jupyter Notebooks. Fabian Neumann did a great job explaining the basics of PyPSA and how to use it for analysis.

We also prepared an example notebook such that you can explore the tutorial network yourself. Just open in our notebooks repository the file sample-network-analysis.ipynb. For further inspiration on what you can analyse and do with PyPSA, you can explore the examples section in the PyPSA framework documentation.

After playing with the tutorial model and before playing with different functions, it’s important to clean-up data in your model folder before to proceed further to avoid data conflicts. You may use the clean rule for making so:

.../pypsa-earth (pypsa-earth) % snakemake -j 1 clean

Generally, it’s a good idea to repeat the cleaning procedure every time when the underlying data are changed to avoid conflicts between run settings corresponding to different scenarios.

It is also possible to make manual clean-up removing folders “resources”, “networks” and “results”. Those folders store the intermediate output of the workflow and if you don’t need them anymore it is safe to delete them.

Note

This tutorial only covers Nigeria. To make the workflow run on other regions you need to use the config.default.yaml as config.yaml. To use the model in and outside Africa, you should also read How to create a model for you region of interest with PyPSA-Earth?

Model customization section elaborates on building and running a full PyPSA-Earth model.

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