EU Open Sources Ten-Year Network Development Planning Tools via Open-TYNDP

EU Open Sources Ten-Year Network Development Planning Tools via Open-TYNDP

The European Union is moving toward open-source energy planning with the release of Open-TYNDP, a collaboration between Open Energy Transition (OET) and the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E). By leveraging the PyPSA-Eur framework, Open-TYNDP aims to increase transparency and lower barriers for stakeholders participating in the Ten-Year Network Development Plan (TYNDP), the primary mechanism for planning European electricity infrastructure.

Enhancing Transparency in European Energy Planning

Open-TYNDP provides an open-source alternative to the proprietary tools traditionally used in TYNDP cycles. The project specifically targets two critical phases of the planning process: Scenario Building (SB) and Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA).

By open-sourcing these tools, the project seeks to:

  • Increase Transparency: Allow external stakeholders to inspect and validate the models used for multi-billion euro infrastructure decisions.
  • Lower Participation Barriers: Enable a wider range of researchers and policymakers to contribute to and critique energy scenarios.
  • Demonstrate Global Viability: Serve as a proof-of-concept for using open-source frameworks in large-scale, national, or international energy planning beyond Europe.

Technical Implementation and the Soft-Fork Strategy

Open-TYNDP is implemented as a "soft-fork" of the PyPSA-Eur repository. This architectural choice allows the OET to maintain a specialized version of the toolchain for TYNDP requirements while ensuring that improvements and new features are contributed back to the upstream PyPSA-Eur project.

Toolchain and Workflow

  • Core Engine: Based on PyPSA-Eur, a widely used open-source model for the European power system.
  • Workflow Management: The project uses snakemake to manage the complex sequence of rules required to build the model and generate reports.
  • Environment Management: Installation is handled via pixi, which creates isolated project environments to ensure reproducibility across different operating systems.
  • Reproducibility: The repository follows a strict philosophy where no intermediary results are stored; all results are computed directly from raw data and code to ensure full auditability.

Development Roadmap and Current Status

Open-TYNDP is currently under active development and is not yet feature-complete. The project is following a phased approach to build trust in the open-source toolchain:

  1. Replication: The current focus is on replicating key figures from the 2024 TYNDP cycle to validate the open-source model against established results.
  2. Alignment: Once validated, the project will align with the 2026 TYNDP cycle.
  3. Feature Expansion: The team is developing new features to address data gaps, improving data interoperability, and creating dynamic visualizations for planning results.

Installation and Usage for Technical Users

For users looking to run the analysis, Open-TYNDP provides two primary installation paths:

  • Windows Users: A dedicated installer (e.g., open-tyndp-0.4.0-pixi-Windows-x86_64.exe) is available on the releases page for automated setup.
  • Manual Installation: Users can clone the repository and use pixi shell -e open-tyndp to activate the environment.

To execute the analysis, the following commands are used:

  • pixi run tyndp-sb: Runs the Scenario Building analysis.
  • pixi run tyndp-cba: Runs the Cost-Benefit Analysis.

Licensing and Citations

The code in Open-TYNDP is released under the MIT License. However, users should note that different licenses and terms of use may apply to the specific input data used within the models. For research purposes, releases are archived on Zenodo with release-specific DOIs to ensure academic reproducibility.

Sources