Hello everybody, I'm Thomas from TNOT and I'm here today to talk about the NG system description
language and all the tools that have been built around it. TNOT is similar to Fraunhofer or
Vito or CNRS. It's a bit smaller, not sure if that means that we're much more agile
because we do have 5,000 people working in a national research organization. Doing a lot of
different things, we have about a thousand people in the ICT unit doing a lot of strategy
things, data stuff, AI stuff and the since two years we have a new team, a new proposition
called the digital transition energy systems where we bring systems engineering knowledge that
we bring to the high tech sector in the Netherlands. A lot to ASML and Philips and near
the field, etc. We try to bring that to the energy domain as we see that the complexity
of software is increasing a lot in the energy domain and systems engineering approach can bring
some clarity. What I started in March at this research is to TNOT and I think the research
institutes like TNOT should focus much more on open source development and they should
collaborate on a European wide scale because we develop things for industry to do it again
and then find implementation partners to actually take it over. A research institute like
TNOT is not allowed to develop to start to compete with other organizations. So we actually
have to build building blocks that everybody can use. I think the energy domain, that's why I'm
very excited also to be here and also to see all the other initiatives that are here. I think
it's sort of a uniquely positioned domain to show that open source solutions can be collaboratively
built between governments, between energy companies coming, between IT companies to actually
show other digital public infrastructures how can be done. I think the limit energy foundation
is a great example of that and I hope that together with people in this room and outside
this room and all the open source initiatives in the energy domain actually show that it makes a lot of
sense for sort of a worldwide global collaborative approach towards a big challenge that we all face.
So today I'll speak mostly about a taxonomy called ESDL and why I think that's important
is that we speak the same language and that the energy systems will be military quality so there will be gas,
hydrogen, warmth and electricity all coming together and people need to make decisions on what to do and how to
weigh sort of should I invest in a heat network, a higher than system or shall we wait for the
grid operated to upgrade the grid. Therefore, a common language could help a lot. To know,
developed the language in 2017, this is one of the projects that I'll skip for now, so we developed
the language in 2017 and there is many standards out there. So I'm not here to push this one standard
I'm simply here because I joined TNO and got excited about this sort of open source
endeavor but if there's a better alternative out there, a better taxonomy that we can all embrace
that would help sort of create one single language, let me know. I know that from previous
discussion at the Linux energy foundation that Toby has from the open energy transition made a case for
a taxonomy built in the open street maps case, we'll speak later about it today I hope and also
at the end of the day there is somebody is usually already in the room presenting GEMS.
It's also a taxonomy to describe the energy grid. Is it built in commodity as well?
Mathematical language. Okay, interesting for all the different commodities as well.
Thanks. So there you have it. Please also visit this last presentation and then help in the discussion
of which one to all adopt basically. So the challenges we saw maybe it's a bit self-explanatory
for people here in this room that there was no interoperability between results of different
models. There was actually a big study in the Netherlands and they said, how does the future look
like and then there were three extremely different outcomes and it was basically impossible for a
government to see like okay but what were the assumptions made, what were the how was the system
described that you used for your modeling. So yeah then you have three completely different
visions. So what to act on as a government can hard. And the last part is the aggregate ability.
So you have business parks, you have municipalities, you have provinces and you have nationwide
maybe even European wide challenges of how to integrate renewables and where to do that best.
So how do you aggregate plans on these different scales? It would mean or it would help a lot
if there would be one single language to describe all these systems based on which you can
do simulations based on which you can aggregate the results to have sort of a common plan and come
go. And the is the on that sort of the is the energy system. It's an XML based solution hierarchical
model. Basically it has five different asset types. So the the ones that you can imagine
and you can create any energy system that you you'd like. You can do many different things
with it. You can store your profile information on it. You can include spatial information.
You can include sort of different plans, even different scenarios, different investment plans
for the future. So there's it's quite a rich model where you can do a lot.
So on high level the thing that makes this better than sort of a tabular approach is I think that
you you can you can create your relationships between all the different parts of your energy system.
And then you're sure that they are connected to one another before you actually do your
simulation that they're connected in the right way. So they're connected in sort of a
hierarchical way as I explained. This is how it's built up. I'm not going to explain that you can
definitely read it online because it's documented quite well. You cannot read this but this is what
it looks like. So they first created this and then they thought like yeah but it's super rich and
it's all encompassing. But then they thought why is it not taking off? Well because people
had to use still by then or had to use sort of coding language to actually browse through
this entire system until they made GIS interface, the map editor. And then also internally
within TNO things started to move because on the map editor you can draw your system and you can sort of
view the different profiles that you have attached to a particular asset that you draw
in your on your map. And then once you do that it simply creates an EIS DL file that you can then
use for your simulation. And that's what they did. So they created a lot of simulations since
this map editor was built in 2019. Many different things, many different areas where it sort of
was applied because all of a sudden all these different research groups started to think like hey
but this actually makes sense a lot for our research as well. So the entire North Sea
a wind park plans were mapped using EIS DL many business parks were mapped so there were many
different projects that actually started to create this EIS DL described systems. And then sort of as
a result there were many models created because of sudden a lot of data became available in this
particular format. So I mean not everything is open source by the way. So for example there
are also proprietary stuff like this wind park profile generator that you can draw up the shape
of a wind park and then it it calculates how the profile or how to power drops if one wind
mill is beyond the other. The urban strategy it's a proprietary solution from synxus.
The one that's not on here is RKGIS from EIS. It's not open source. We do work on a QGIS implementation
at the moment but we are actually also quite excited about the SE collaboration that they start to adapt
EIS DL because that means that from as they have 60% of all municipalities in the Netherlands and
all provinces using their product they could from their proprietary GIS interface actually use all
these open source models to run their simulations and they could use their sort of known interface
to actually simply drop and EIS DL and then send it to one of these open source simulations.
So that's what actually I'm super excited about that opportunity. The challenge is however
to make these simulations good and better than what proprietary offerings at the moment
provide. Because I mean TNO still is a research institute so we don't necessarily excel
in designing user interfaces as you can imagine. So there's all these tools that make it easy
make it easier. Descript with EIS DL to use it to visualize results and many of it is
quite well documented. So it started to sort of to flower the all sort of ecosystem of tools
around this this language in this map and one of the products was the energy data repository
where because people that use EIS DL they wanted data and trust worthy data. So we created
this data repository where assets are actually described in EIS DL like manner. So you could
easily include them in your simulation. One of the initiatives is together with a PBL and
other Dutch large governmental institute to look at the industry, look at all the processes that
the industry actually have and then convert these processes into EIS DL assets so that it becomes
really easy for the industry to say like hey I use this particular heater or this particular bio gas
whatever thing and then also you have your EIS DL analogy of that asset available you could actually
start connecting it in within your company but also with other assets in your energy hub and start
to simulate what the best way forward is to build your energy hub for example. So energy hubs is
is one particular domain where tools have been developed and there's commercial energy advisors
actually targeting these particular domains there was a very large company using EIS DL and SM one of
the open source simulation tools build around it. Unfortunately I heard last week that they
chose for a proprietary alternative I think because they didn't understand sort of the richness
of what EIS DL could provide and they definitely didn't understand I think the opportunity that
if you would together as an industry jointly developed open source solutions you have a much bigger
impact. So that was unfortunate but there is still some I recall it iron in the fire so
there's many different projects in companies that use it and that we hope to develop
a community with where we can also draw some maintenance fees from. How many minutes do I still have?
What's the time? As timid as that? Text. So the people group is another
gives user interface that started to specifically for district heating and then SC now starts to
adapt EIS DL and mostly for business parks as a start but as I said as they provide the interface
for many municipalities and provinces it makes a lot of sense that will also be part of our target area.
So the application remains they're very I think I've mentioned that there's also market modeling
I mean there's it's quite vast right so we are 5,000 people and we have I think over
1500 people working in the energy domain so so they do a lot of advice for the government and then
I said I guess sure let's use EIS DL for it. One of the things that has been
developed a bit more recently is the spatial energy explorer where you can sort of drop your EIS DL systems
and you there's a lot of public data and information out there so one of the things that I hope
this year is also that we start to connect more with grid operators to together give a better insight
to all the entrepreneurs and companies that want to expand but don't know what the exact situation
is and to make it actually very easy to see like hey what's the available capacity what happens
if we combine sort of multiple companies in sort of a group transport agreement as it's called
in Netherlands which is happening quite a lot now because there's a lot of congestion and these tools
could could help with easing and facilitating sort of both be offered from grid operator to
a company as from energy hubs to say like hey how how shall we organize how should we share
the limited capacity on the grid yeah I mean I think this is this is quite
make sense so in energy hubs I briefly mentioned it before so typical questions that you can answer
with with this simulation a software is showing up on the right so is it well the mentioned
are the imbalance so what's the energetic balance so you can also see like what's the impact
either you're hiding in your gas your heat in your your electricity flows and you can you can
answer basically the effects of what would happen if I add a communal battery or if I interfere
in any way in my energy hub this is a good diagram which fun tool if you know it is nice you can
just get a repo in it and it shows you sort of the architecture of the particular repo so I did that
for for SM I was one of the developers said it's almost right you didn't say what was not right
you can check though because this is the repo that the left foot through this is the picture that
he made so this is correct and and this is sort of a bit a bit behind the curtains are not going
in detail but what I think is nice to show is that you have your different sort of carriers
your different solvers that you can use per carrier but then you can also use any other
solvers obviously available and also some solvers that's for example alian there is building
and it's built in such a way that you can easily attach your own calculation
sort of engine to it so for example one particular company made this clever way of
estimating what the low profile looked like of a EV park for particular angi hub and that particular
model could easily be integrated into into this simulation and then make a work so the North Sea
great great place and there's a lot of wind mills being built if you don't know the jet
and that has been metin is the oh and also the interconnections with the mainland
were modeled and then sort of a like a particular example of misido which is a simulation engine
that used a lot for for heat but also for gas by the way I was just he is was created
and used to basically show like what would happen with the pressure in the hydrogen tanks
if you would add electrolyzers based next to these wind parks and where you would add the hydrogen
storage it was simulated what was the effect on the pressure in the system that was crit
long story short I guess there's all these different standards ontologies maybe not even
the right word data models maybe mathematical descriptions I wrote it there already so I look forward
to to that perspective and I think I think sort of to to get this picture and make it as
light blue as possible would definitely be my my ambition yeah then this is another tool that was
been built to help sort of orchestrate many different simulations it's also open source but I'm not going
to go too much in detail about it so maybe just as a last announcement we had a project
proposals submitted that basically looked at combining the knowledge on on AI so at you know we
developed our own LLM we didn't steal any data though so we actually we are compliant with
a GDPR and we are now at GPT 3.5 so we're a bit behind but at least we didn't steal a data
and so that took most of the time to actually create all the contracts with all the data providers
and now we're actually figuring out like okay what sort of the strategy of bringing this
ethically trained LLM to the market but while doing that we also generated a lot of knowledge on AI
so now we're training AI on ESDL to make it easier to query energy systems that have been described
in ESDL but also to change them and then to run iteratively different simulations so that's
that's the idea we do together with with the synxes so that synxes developed solutions on GPUs
so then you need to sort of break up your simulation models so that it can in parallel run
and all these different GPUs quite cool but we we're not sure if we can start this
but it helps out and I hope to hear from most of you today. Thanks.
Two minutes? Okay.
I was very clear. Why do you think that the data model started to be popular when there was a user in
why do I think the data model started to become possible when there was user interface popular?
Well because because people that don't understand what the data model is all of a sudden could
simply drop in a user interface that they could select like hey I have a woodmill here and
I could connect it to something else it will pop up and say that connection is not allowed and then
they would start to think like oh okay so and then they would actually start to create sound
energy systems described in ESDL and it was much easier for the data scientist and the software
engineers then to use that input generated by people don't understand data models so there was
much better collaboration actually between the different departments.
There's seconds so just count down together. Okay thank you everybody. Have a nice day.
Thank you all, thank you so much.