Sustainable Energy Transitions Laboratory (SENTINEL)

Coordinated by ETH Zurich, according to the proposal SENTINEL promises to develop a fundamentally new energy modeling system that integrates the criteria of the transition to a renewables-based energy system from the ground up. 

Prof. Urge-Vorsatz will be leading WP3 related to the modeling of energy demand with a budget of over EUR300K.

The project is most likely to start in October 2019, and will be 36 months long.

Overview:

We propose to develop, test, and make freely available a modelling framework that can allow a wide range of decision-makers to address the critical design challenges they now confront. The framework we propose is fundamentally different from those currently in use. In crucial ways it will be built with a renewable energy system in mind – taking into account their particular temporal and geographic issues – rather than adapted to include a rising shares of renewables. Related to this, than a single, large, self-contained monolithic model like many of the key models that exist now, we propose a platform on which a suite of highly specialized models can be linked together as users’ needs require. By ensuring that models are fully open and transparent – perhaps most importantly containing open input data – and developing standard protocols for linking information flows between them, we ensure that new specialized models can be added to this framework as new challenges, or issues requiring investigation, arise.