Openmod Workshop South Africa 2026

Workshop
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Openmod Workshop South Africa 2026

26 June 2026 • Cape Town, South Africa

Openmod comes to Africa

Open Energy Transition and the Energy Systems Research Group from the University of Cape Town are delighted to announce the inaugural Openmod Workshop in Africa, to be held at the University of Cape Town on Friday, 26 June 2026.

Open-source energy system modelling remains underrepresented across much of Africa’s energy planning landscape. Openmod helps address this gap as a community-driven movement that advances awareness, exchange, and real-world implementation of open-source energy modelling by bringing together researchers, developers, planners, and practitioners who openly share ideas, code, data, and experience. Learn more about the openmod community by reading the manifesto here.

Building on the success of the Openmod Meets USA event co-hosted by Open Energy Transition and Stanford University and workshops in Stockholm (2025), Grenoble (2024), and soon Canada (2026), Openmod South Africa 2026 brings this international community to the African continent for the first time. With the International Energy Workshop (IEW) taking place in Cape Town on 22-24 June 2026 and the IEA-ETSAP Summer 2026 Workshop on 25-26 June 2026, it will be an exciting week for the wider energy modelling community. If you are coming for either event, we would be delighted to welcome you to our openmod as well.

Event details

:white_check_mark::clipboard: Register here: https://forms.gle/rfkKXAeenPCJp3uW8

Call for Contributions

We welcome in person contributions in one or more of the following formats:

:high_voltage: Lightning Talks: present a project, workflow, or tool development in a concise format

:desktop_computer: Technical demonstrations: live code walkthroughs and implementation case studies

:thought_balloon: Breakout Sessions: collaborate with experts in interactive sessions on diverse energy topics

:handshake: Networking: engage with practitioners, developers, regulators, and system operators

:heart_exclamation:If you are interested in contributing, please indicate your preferred format and topic in the staging area. The organising team will curate the final programme.

All contributors are expected to attend in person. For general participants, in-person attendance is strongly encouraged to enable deeper technical exchange and collaboration.

Submission Deadline: May 1st, 2026

:tada: We look forward to welcoming the Southern African and broader African open energy modelling community to Cape Town and to building the foundations for a more transparent, collaborative, and open energy future in our beloved continent :tada:

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Programme

Friday 26 June 2026

Location: University of CapeTown

Times Span Item
08:45 - 09:00 00:15 ARRIVAL & REGISTRATION
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Staging area 1

This staging area is intended for potential contributors. Please feel free to edit and update the description of your intended in person contribution as your ideas evolve. Some of the entries listed here may still be at an early stage of development. Not all suggestions will necessarily be selected or developed into lightning talks or presentations.

The deadline for submitting your potential contribution is May 1st 2026. After this deadline passes, the organizing group will screen the suggestions and develop the final program.

This is a wikipost that anyone registered with the forum can edit. You are encouraged to add your potential contributions directly here therefore. The order given is chronological downwards.

Note also that the topics and postings on this forum related to this event will be reorganized as the content builds. So just be aware that some URLs will break going forward. But the cape-town-workshop-2026 tag will persist.

Lightning talks:

Each lightening talk consists of a 6 minutes presentation followed by 4 minutes of Q&A. Profile your favorite project, tool, data, research findings, etc

When adding your lightening talk contribution, it should look something similiar to the following example post

Example

:white_check_mark: title : Using a global energy system model for a detailed country study
presenter : Martha Frysztacki (Open Energy Transition)
description : This presentation introduces a case study applying PyPSA-Earth for an energy transition study in Kazakhstan. We will show how we tailored a global open energy system model with high spatial and temporal resolution data to the specific country’s requirements. The novel approach avoids the time-consuming creation of models for every country and fosters collaboration, addressing the challenges of the energy transition together. Extended from this paper in Applied Energy .
code repository : GitHub - pypsa-meets-earth/pypsa-earth: PyPSA-Earth: A flexible Python-based open optimisation model to study energy system futures around the world. · GitHub
literature : Based on “PyPSA-Earth. A new global open energy system optimization model demonstrated in Africa”. Applied Energy . 341 : 121096. ISSN 0306-2619. doi:10.1016/j.apenergy.2023.121096

Proposed contributions (please add your talk below :down_arrow: following the above template/style)

:one: title :
presenter :
description :
code repository :
literature :

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