Assessment of open electricity network data by renewable energy scenarios

Abstract

In the 21th century transparency and openness from the commercial sector towards their customers has become an important aspect of marketing. This also accounts for the net operator Enexis, who has made their network and consumption data openly available on the internet. Simultaneously an energy transition is taking place in the developed world in which fossil fuels are getting replaced by renewable ones. Local renewable energy initiatives will reply to open data when available. This led to the question whether it is possible to use this Open Asset data of Enexis to explore an energy transition scenario.

In this research an energy transition scenario has been constructed comprising of 50% electricity production from solar energy and 50% electricity production from wind energy. The suitable areas for these two types of renewable energy have been identified with a multi-criteria analysis using both the Open Asset dataset from Enexis and various other datasets. In addition to that, service areas were generated from the substations transformers to identify which service points are connected to which technical buildings.

The Open Asset dataset provided by Enexis contains a lot of information in point, polygon and polyline shape files. However performing an entire energy transition on the data is not possible due to various reasons. First, the metadata provided in the Open Asset dataset contains not enough metadata in order to effectively calculate the capacity within the service areas. Second, there is a high amount of uncertainty in the interconnectivity of the grid lines; this is caused by the lack of metadata and the lack of topology rules. Third, the network in the case area has a higher complexity than expected based on literature.