PyPSA model of the South African electricity system at the level of ESKOM's supply regions.

The model is described and evaluated in the paper PyPSA-ZA: Investment and operation co-optimization of integrating wind and solar in South Africa at high spatial and temporal detail, 2017, arXiv:1710.11199.

This repository contains the scripts to automatically reproduce the analysis.

To build and solve the model, a computer with about 20GB of memory with a strong interior-point solver supported by the modelling library PYOMO like Gurobi or CPLEX are required.

We recommend as preparatory steps (the path before the % sign denotes the directory in which the commands following the % should be entered):

1. cloning the repository using git (to a directory without any spaces in the path)

   /some/other/path % cd /some/path/without/spaces
   /some/path/without/spaces % git clone https://github.com/FRESNA/pypsa-za.git

2. installing the necessary python dependencies using conda (from within the pypsa-za directory)

   .../pypsa-za % conda env create -f environment.yaml
   .../pypsa-za % source activate pypsa-za  # or conda activate pypsa-za on windows

3. getting the separate data bundle (see also [Data dependencies] below) and unpacking it in data

   .../data % wget "https://vfs.fias.science/d/f204668ef2/files/?dl=1&p=/pypsa-za-bundle.7z"
   .../data % 7z x pypsa-za-bundle.7z

All results and scenario comparisons are reproduced using the workflow management system snakemake

.../pypsa-za % snakemake
[... will take about a week on a recent computer with all scenarios ...]

snakemake will first compute several intermediate data files in the directory resources, then prepare unsolved networks in networks, solve them and save the resulting networks in results/version-0.x/networks and finally render the main plots into results/version-0.5/plots.

Instead of computing all scenarios (defined by the product of all wildcards in the scenario config section), snakemake also allows to compute only a specific scenario like csir-aggressive_redz_E_LC:

.../pypsa-za % snakemake results/version-0.5/plots/network_csir-aggressive_redz_E_LC_p_nom

For ease of installation and reproduction we provide a bundle pypsa-za-bundle.7z with the necessary data files: