2025-02-05 Sig Grid Modelling and Simulation #3

 Date

Feb 5, 2025

Recording: here

  Participants & Introductions

• @Jonas van den Bogaard(OSPO / Alliander) – Led the meeting as Thomas was absent; expressed openness in sharing open-source practices and experiences with TenneT.

• @Bart Pleiter (OpenSTEF / Alliander) – Responsible for OpenSTEF development within Alliander.

• @Peter Salemink (PGM / Alliander) – Product Owner for the Power Grid Model (PGM), focused on its day-to-day development and direction.

• @peter mitri (PowSyBl) – Contributed insights on documentation and regulatory aspects.

• Edwin Derks (TenneT) – Programmer; keen on expanding open-source involvement within TenneT, particularly around model and tool adoption.

• @Yarille Ortiz (LFEnergy) - started the meeting

🔍 OpenSTEF – Annual Review

🧠 What It Is:

OpenSTEF (Short-Term Forecasting Stack) is a full-stack solution for short-term load forecasting (hours to days). It goes beyond being a single model and includes:

• Data preprocessing

• Input validation

• Backtesting & postprocessing

• Probabilistic forecasting with uncertainty bands

• Support for different models (including custom ones)

🛠️ Practical Applications:

• Used in production by Alliander for load and congestion prediction.

• Also used for predicting couple points with TenneT

• Forecasting at granular levels: cable, transformer, and direct customer.

🔄 Contributions:

• 50% of the code is written by +/- 5 developers

• Alliander contributes approximately 75% of the total code base.

• Community growth is helping onboard more contributors.

🚀 Growth & Internationalization:

• Sigholm (Sweden): Preparing OpenSTEF for production; exploring integration with Swedish DSOs to support internationalization.

• Plans to:

  • Strengthen existing community

  • Collaborate with Dexter Energy

  • Organize coding sessions

  • Scale up usage beyond the Netherlands

📦 Discussion:

What is the discussion management feature?

Inputs:

• Weather predictions (solar radiation, wind speed)

• Day-ahead market prices

• Usage profiles of large consumer groups

• (Planned) Historical load usage

• Model: Linear Quantile Regression – ideal for congestion use cases (e.g., extrapolating scenarios with low solar/wind availability)

Outputs:

• Load forecasts every 15 minutes at varying probability levels

• Targeted predictions for:

  • Individual assets

  • Transformer stations

  • Direct customer loads

Used actively in congestion management tools at Alliander.

⚙️ Annual Review - Power Grid Model (PGM)

Overview:

An open-source, high-performance library for:

• Distribution grid calculations

• Power flow analysis

• State estimation

• Short-circuit calculations

Usage & Adoption:

• Alliander: Widely used across teams for grid planning, monitoring, and congestion.

• Community Adoption (as known before the webinar and questionairre… ):

  • Enexis: Active production use

  • Stedin: Ongoing proof-of-concept

  • TUDelft & TU/e: Academic research and algorithm improvements

  • GridCal: Uses PGM as the underlying engine

  • Pandapower: Also supports integration

  • Soptim: Added new component to model transformers and lines with diverse input profiles

Contributions (as known after the webinar and questionairre):

• Open-source library with both code and non-code contributions

• Adoptions increase worldwide. Over 20 organizations currently use it; 50+ plan to adopt in near future.

🏆 Key Achievements

• Released power-grid-model-ds: toolkit for data/graphing (thanks to Jaap Schouten, now TSC member)

• New Raphson State Estimator (v1.7x)

• Observability checker for radial networks

• Generic branch component added by Soptim

🌐 Community & Promotion

• Presentations at FOSDEM and LF Energy Summits

• Project has officially moved to LF Energy Incubation

• Strong community growth and visibility

🎯 Goals and Roadmap

Development Goals:

• Add support for current sensors (currently: voltage/power only)

• Merge nodes functionality

• Integrate academic contributions (e.g., asymmetrical line modeling from TU/e)

Community Events:

• May 21 Meetup at TUDelft – full-day collaborative event

• More presentations planned at LF Energy Summits

From Incubation to Early Adoption:

• This year finish the OpenSSF Best Practices badge to go to early adoption stage.

• Working on:

  • Contributor onboarding via “Good First Issues”

  • Enhancing documentation and transparency

  • Clarifying infrastructure and regulatory implications (not a standalone solution – noted by Peter Mitri)

Positive feedback from contributors: Good documentation seen as critical to community engagement.

🔄 Collaboration Opportunities

PowSyBl Integration:

• Exploring synergies between PowSyBl and PowerGridModel

• Edwin Derks (TenneT) expressed interest in evaluating joint use cases across TenneT systems

✅ Action Items for Next Meeting

• Finalize plans for September 9 meetup

• Continue exploring PowSyBl + PGM synergy

• Schedule up-date with PowSyBl for next meeting