Australia’s first open source model simulates our renewable energy future

The University of Melbourne has been awarded more than $900,000 in Federal funding to develop Australia's first open source renewable energy model, Minister for Resources and Energy Martin Ferguson announced this week. The new state-of-the-art model will help researchers better understand and simulate the country's demand for renewable energies and will help experts design electricity systems for the future. The project will be led by University of Melbourne researchers Roger Dargaville, School of Earth Sciences, and Assoc Michael Brear, School of Engineering and the University's Melbourne Energy Institute. Dargaville said designing a cost effective and reliable low carbon national energy system was a significant challenge, combining renewable and traditional energy generation technologies, transmission networks and economics. "The model will examine if the current regulatory system can cope with a high penetration of renewable energy, and what new policies may be required to enable the transition to a low carbon economy," he said. He said the model will help answer a series of questions of not only where the best locations for each technology are, but which combination of technologies at which locations minimize variability across the systems, maximize system stability, minimize new transmission lines and keep backup systems as small as possible. ? "The open source element of this project makes it unique and a well overdue addition to the toolbox for energy researchers in Australia to simulate our National Energy Market, " he said.