WEFEConfigurator is an open software tool designed to set up, simulate and optimize models of integrated water-energy-food-environment systems (iWEFEs). These combine different renewable energy (RE) technologies, such as photovoltaics, wind turbines, hydropower, and biogas plants, storage systems such as batteries, hydrogen, or water tanks, and productive uses, such as water pumping, water treatment, irrigation, cold storage, agricultural processing, via smart control systems. An example of such are agrivoltaics which provide sustainable renewable energy production tapping WEFE synergies (e.g. reducing land competition between energy and food production and reducing evapotranspiration from the field, leading to less irrigation demand). It utilizes oemof.solph and oemof.tabular libraries, along with additional plugins for extended functionality. Users can create and run scenarios using different technologies as components with their respective demand and generation profiles as csv files. Moreover, the user can also define new components/technologies in addition to the existing ones. The results from the modelled scenario can then be interactively visualized through dash.
Make sure a supported Python Version (3.9 or greater) and an interpreter (preferably PyCharm) is installed on your system. Install CBC solver for oemof-solph using the installation instructions: https://github.com/oemof/oemof-solph?tab=readme-ov-file#installing-a-solver
For using the WEFEConfigurator, clone the repository to your local machine. Then create a new virtual environment with a supported Python Version (3.9 or greater). Activate the new virtual environment and move to the repository folder to install the oemof-tabular-plugins package.
pip install oemof_tabular_plugins==0.0.2rc4 numpy==1.26.0 git+https://github.com/oemof/oemof-tabular.git@dev git+https://github.com/sedos-project/oemof.industry.git@saltwater
Verify the installation of CBC solver by typing in the terminal:
oemof_installation_test
If successful, the following message will appear:
If unsuccessful, the message will say "cbc: not working", in which case an external executable "cbc.exe" file from a successful installation should be included in your path and your system restarted. Once all of these steps have been completed successfully, you are ready to run scenarios!
Joint effort of the research and practitioner community is required to model many other WEF components, including traditional, nature-based and low-cost approaches. New components can be added in two ways:
- Components which follow concepts of existing component classes can be created by filling a template of that class. In practice we recommend to start from an existing instance of that class which can be found in the WEFE Component Library. This instance is then adapted and filled with specific information for the new component to be modeled.
- The second way is to create a new facade allowing to combine various component classes and introducing new functions (e.g. for conversion). In practice we also recommend to start from an existing facade and adapt it according to the characteristics of the new component to be modeled. The documentation and practical examples for creating new components are still in an early stage. A more detailed description follows soon in our readthedocs.
Meanwhile, the recipe for creating a new component in short is as follows:
- copy paste a converter facade code
- get rid of unused parameters in docstring and in attributes definition, add new required ones
- modify build_solph_components accordingly (depending how complex your component is)
- add the import into src/wefe/facades/init.py
- add the component in the TYPEMAP in src/wefe/init.py
For Windows users, an error might appear when installing oemof-tabular:
"ERROR: Could not build wheels for cchardet, which is required to install pyproject.toml-based projects"
Guidelines on how to fix this error: twintproject/twint#1407 (comment)
Simply click on the green Use this template button on the left of the Clone or download button.
The detailed instructions to create a new repository from this template can be found here.
This folder is where you should place the code of your package (package name to be edited in setup.py under name)
You can install it locally for developing with
python setup.py install
More details for packaging are available on https://packaging.python.org
To build the docs simply go to the docs folder
cd docs
Install the requirements
pip install -r docs_requirements.txt
and run
make html
The output will then be located in docs/_build/html and can be opened with your favorite browser
In this template, 3 possible linters are proposed:
- flake8 only sends warnings and error about linting (PEP8)
- pylint sends warnings and error about linting (PEP8) and also allows warning about imports order
- black sends warning but can also fix the files for you
You can perfectly use the 3 of them or subset, at your preference. Don't forget to edit .travis.yml if you want to deactivate the automatic testing of some linters!