RGI Grid Awards 2024 successful outcome

Outreach RGI Grid Awards
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Eleven weeks ago on Monday 22 July 2024, @robbie.morrison and @Lucie submitted an application for recognition of good practice to the Berlin‑based Renewables Grid Initiative (RGI) on behalf of the openmod.

By way of background, RGI describes itself as a “unique group of transmission system operators and environmental and climate NGOs collaborating on a nature‑friendly renewables grid for the energy transition”.

We are pleased to say that our application was successful.

Indeed, the judging panel created an Outstanding Achievement Award specifically for the openmod outside of the three standard award categories. As RGI notes in its confirmation email to us last week:

The jury was very impressed with your submission demonstrating highly collaborative creation of relevant innovative knowledge. They thought it was a fantastic initiative and therefore deserving a special award.

Award ceremony and live‑stream

The award ceremony will take place on Monday 04 November 2024 at 17:00–17:30 CET during the 5th PCI Energy Days conference hosted by the European Commission. Both @robbie.morrison and @Lucie plan to attend in person in Brussels. Read more about the conference:

The event will be live web-streamed on DG Energy’s YouTube channel on both days (DG = European Commission Directorate-General). And the link above provides the associated YouTube URLs for each day.

Description of the openmod

We needed to provide a draft description of the openmod for the 2024 Award Brochure — which is given in the posting that follows.

Community

This award is a tribute to those who met in Berlin a decade ago to create the openmod, to those who have contributed since, to the many people who have organized the various workshops over the years, and to everyone who has attended events or aided online discussions.

It is also a recognition for those engaged outside of Europe and North America and especially in the global south, who are an important part of our community and who often work in relative isolation.

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Text for RGI Award Brochure

Status: final from applicant

Description of the openmod

Public policy for energy and climate often relies on intransparent models, whereby the input data, underlying assumptions, and/or numerical processing are either opaque or legally‑encumbered, thus hindering and perhaps preventing transparency, reusability, and accountability in decision‑making.

Growing awareness of these limitations led to the creation of the Open Energy Modelling Initiative (openmod) in Berlin in September 2014. At that time, 28 energy system modellers came together to create a manifesto advocating the open licensing of energy modelling frameworks, datasets, and research findings.

In the context of energy modelling, “open” stands for publishing and sharing source code and data under established open‑source and open data licenses. These licenses clearly define how the associated work can be used, modified, and redistributed by modellers to the benefit of their respective communities and beyond.

Accordingly, the openmod encourages the sharing of source code, datasets, early‑stage ideas, and research outputs, aiming to improve model accuracy, reproducibility, transparency, and comprehensiveness. Additionally, it seeks to improve research efficiency through consensus standards for data semantics and metadata, and creating consistent interfaces for submodels and support libraries. The Open Energy Ontology project, for instance, provides formalized definitions for data, thereby improving information collection, sharing, collaboration, and review.

The openmod initiative has successfully fostered an international community of energy modellers, hosted 18 workshops, and created an online forum and mailing list, each with 1400 members. The openmod enables a social network that connects researchers in the global south and north, enabling a wider participation in decarbonization efforts and catalyzing useful exchanges more generally. Key achievements include influencing public agencies, like the EU Joint Research Centre, to adopt open‑source frameworks.

The openmod community continues to grow, with widening geographical participation, as open energy modelling becomes increasingly mainstream for public policy support. Indeed, this entirely volunteer effort is leading the shift towards more collaborative, transparent, and repeatable energy system modelling, underpinned by important principles from open science.

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Just noting that this topic is now private to this community. It will be made generally viewable after the award ceremony in four weeks time.

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@Lucie and @robbie.morrison were asked by RGI to provide a three sentence statement for use in media liaison — this is what we proposed:

This [RGI Good Practice] award reflects the decade‑long collective effort of the openmod community to promote open, transparent, and reusable energy system modeling. It underscores the importance of openly sharing data and research to explore rapid decarbonization pathways, to support public policy, and to bridge the global north‑south divide in energy transitions. We [open energy modelers] hope that this recognition by the RGI judging panel will inspire others to join and contribute to the development of transparent and clean energy futures using open and collaborative methods from open science.

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