Last week the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the United States’ epicenter of solar and wind research, hosted the first openmod workshop in North America. The workshop was a congregation of academics, scientists, researchers, and open software and data enthusiasts gathering to discuss the state of open source energy modeling.
We discussed a broad range of models. On one end, there were extremely detailed models. Models that are excellent for understanding how the electric grid will respond to changing weather patterns that alter renewable energy availability in the coming hours or days. Models like ours at Carnegie Science, which focus on 50 year to century scale energy transitions, were the other end.
Beyond interest in models, some groups focused on model inputs and making data available. The Catalyst Cooperative is gathering data from disparate sources into an open communal databases for everyone to use. This effort is part of their Public Utility Data Liberation (PUDL) project.
In line with the communal data theme, I presented a 7 minute lightening round talk on the electricity demand project Dave Farnham (@farnham_h2o) and I have been working on. This is a project focused on making publicly available electricity demand data usable by everyone and was the subject of a previous post.
Altering data can be contentious. And, it should be if there is no well defined method to identify data to be replaced and deciding how to replace it. Because of this, I initially thought there would be some opposition to our work. After all, a 7 minute talk is not enough time to allay everyone’s fears.
There was support for our approach once the workshop participants saw the magnitude of the anomalous deviations we target. One participant was the exception who needed much more detail than what was possible in my 7 minute talk. We invested the additional time and effort discussing the details. And, it paid off. In the end, this participant expressed his support for our method.
In the coming weeks I hope to post a link to a recording of the talk, which is not currently available. For now, please see the linked slides if you are interested.