User:RobbieIanMorrison/sandbox/work in progress 11

Open electricity grid projects are projects that use open data and open source software techniques to build representative models of electricity grids. Such models can serve as a precursor to electricity load flow simulations or as a component in broader energy system models. Open electricity grid projects exist for the simple reason that detailed information about the structure and electrical properties of electrical grids is not generally made public.

Instead, researchers use crowdsourced data to create a plausible description of the grid in question. Mathematical techniques are used to infer an internally consistent network and perhaps also produce decomposed (simplified) representations for numerical use. Different voltage levels can be accommodated. Some projects concentrate on the high voltage grid, some on distribution networks, and others on both.

Validation of the resulting grid model is a major topic, particularly as much of the primary data is uploaded by the general public and who may not be particularly familiar with electrical components.

Official data availability
The process of collecting data is wasteful of research effort and of public funding. As one set of authors put it:

"[D]ata collection, maintenance and update are tedious processes which have to be performed by different institutions. This process is inefficient as there is no possibility to reuse data from other sources although data has been collected in many publicly financed projects."

Two reasons are regularly given to justify the nondisclosure of power system data: concerns over system security and concerns over commercial sensitivity. When grid data is released it is often not georeferenced, an omission which makes the information virtually unusable. In addition, the data may be provided as a PDF document, which is not naturally machine-readable.

Grid data availability in has improved slightly in Europe, since about 2010, with the release of incomplete datasets by ENTSO-E, the German Federal Network Agency (BNetzA), and the British National Grid. A 2011 amendment to national energy legislation in the United Kingdom granted third party access to electricity, gas, and oil planning data and resulted in a significant disclosure of datasets pertaining to electricity transmission.

OpenStreetMap
A number of grid projects draw data from OpenStreetMap (OSM). OpenStreetMap, in turn, relies on volunteered geographic information (VGI). In the context of Germany in 2017 at least:

"Although the OSM database is not a power database, OSM power data quality still is the best alternative to date in deriving open grid models and griddata."

Data copyright and database rights
Intellectual property issues span xxx.

Information derived from OpenStreetMap (OSM) carries special requirements.

Published standards
The common information model (CIM) is an electric power industry standard formally adopted by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). CIM allows application software to exchange information about the state of an electrical network. CIM is particularly useful for grid models because it can be readily translated to software-specific data formats for further analysis. The OpenGridMap project is able, for instance, to export grid models in CIM format.

Other issues
Proprietary binary data formats, such as PowerFactory and PowerWord, are also used to store and exchange grid models. Some projects release their data using a proprietary format while applying an open license, a practice that is far from ideal.

Open energy modeling projects that embed AC load flow are key candidates for the use of open grid data. For instance, the PyPSA model draws on datasets from SciGRID and GridKit.

Enipedia also contains electricity grid data but this data has not been used to generate grid models.

Open electricity grid projects
Xxxx.

DINGO
The DIstribution Network GeneratOr (DINGO) is an open tool used to generate synthetic medium-voltage and low-voltage distribution grids based on open data.

GridLAB-D
GridLAB-D xxx.

Hutcheon and Bialek dataset
The Hutcheon and Bialek dataset xxx.


 * proprietary PowerWorld simulator
 * https://www.powerworld.com/knowledge-base/updated-and-validated-power-flow-model-of-the-main-continental-european-transmission-network

OpenDSS
OpenDDS xxx.

OpenGridMap
OpenGridMap employs crowdsourcing techniques to gather detailed data on electricity network components and then infer a realistic network structure using methods from statistics and graph theory. The scope of the project is worldwide and both distribution and transmission networks can be reverse engineered. The project is managed by the Chair of Business Information Systems, TUM Department of Informatics, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany. The project maintains a website and a Facebook page and provides an Android mobile app to help the public document electrical devices, such as transformers and substations. The bulk of the data is being made available under a Creative Commons CC BY 3.0 IGO license. The processing software is written primarily in Python and MATLAB and is hosted on GitHub.

OpenGridMap provides a tailored GIS web application, layered on OpenStreetMap, which contributors can use to upload and edit information directly. The same database automatically stores field recordings submitted by the mobile app. Subsequent classification by experts allows normal citizens to document and photograph electrical components and have them correctly identified. The project is experimenting with the use of hobby drones to obtain better information on associated facilities, such as photovoltaic installations. Transmission line data is also sourced from and shared with OpenStreetMap. Each component record is verified by a moderator.

Once sufficient data is available, the transnet software is run to produce a likely network, using statistical correlation, Voronoi partitioning, and minimum spanning tree (MST) algorithms. The resulting network can be exported in CSV (separate files for nodes and lines), XML, and CIM formats. CIM models are well suited for translation into software-specific data formats for further analysis, including power grid simulation. Transnet also displays descriptive statistics about the resulting network for visual confirmation.

The project is motivated by the need to provide datasets for high-resolution energy system models, so that energy system transitions (like the German Energiewende) can be better managed, both technically and policy-wise. The rapid expansion of renewable generation and the anticipated uptake of electric vehicles means that electricity system models must increasingly represent distribution and transmission networks in some detail.

, OpenGridMap techniques have been used to estimate the low voltage network in the German city of Garching and to estimate the high voltage grids in several other countries.

osmTGmod
Xxxxxx xxxx.

SciGRID
SciGRID, short for Scientific Grid, is an open source model of the German and European electricity transmission networks. The research project is managed by Next Energy (officially the EWE Research Centre for Energy Technology) located at the University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany. The project maintains a website and an email newsletter. SciGRID is written in Python and uses a PostgreSQL database. The first release (v0.1) was made on 15June 2015.

SciGRID aims to rectify the lack of open research data on the structure of electricity transmission networks within Europe. This lack of data frustrates attempts to build, characterise, and compare high resolution energy system models. SciGRID utilizes transmission network data available from the OpenStreetMap project, available under the Open Database License (ODbL), to automatically author transmission connections. SciGRID will not use data from closed sources. SciGRID can also mathematically decompose a given network into a simpler representation for use in energy models.

A related project is GridKit, released under an MIT license. GridKit is being developed to investigate the possibility of a 'heuristic' analysis to augment the route-based analysis used in SciGRID. Data is available for network models of the European and North-American high-voltage electricity grids.

Temporary

 * Egerer et al (2014) on electricity sector data


 * Milano (2010) on power system scripting


 * Medjroubi et al (2017) on open power grid modeling
 * section 4.1 on OSM plus SciGRID and osmTGmod




 * International Solar Energy Society, German Section
 * http://www.energymap.info/

Category:Electric power transmission Category:Electrical engineering Category:Monopoly (economics)