Defining System Topology

In the Topology.JSON file, the system topology can be defined. The system topology describes:

  1. The nodes: Here you can alter the number and names of nodes you want to model. Node names can be chosen freely.

  2. The carriers: Here you can specify the carriers that you want to model in your system, e.g., electricity, hydrogen, gas, etc.. In general, it is important that the carries names that you specify match the carrier names that are specified in the JSON file of the technologies that you wish to have in your case study e.g. if in the JSON file of a gas turbine the carrier “gas” is used, then you need to define your gas carrier as “gas”. Note: in theory, carrier names can be chosen freely: for each carrier specified you can (later) simply set a demand, production, import and export, and you can adjust conversion technologies to produce or use this carrier, and subsequently an energy balance for this carrier will be solved.

  3. The investment periods: Here you can specify the number and names of investment periods you want to model. This is a future feature, for now only single-period analysis is possible.

  4. The time horizon: Here you can enter the start and end date of your model run and the resolution. By default, the length is one year with a resolution of one hour. NB: the dates you fill in here determine how many time steps are generated in the templates for input data (i.e., in the default case, 8760 time steps are accounted for, so you would need to define hourly input data for 1 year). You can later decide to run the model using only part of your data, by not reading all the data into the model.

  5. The investment period length: Here you can specify the length of one investment period (in years). This is a future feature, for now only single-period analysis is possible.