Welcome to the citiwatts wiki 👋

Introduction

citiwatts.eu is an open-source online platform that supports the planning processes of the energy sector at local and national levels in a transparent manner. It is a web-app that allows you to conduct initial and quick estimations of the heating and cooling demand in any European region as well as the local renewable energy potentials to meet this demand. Subsequently, by using more detailed data and applying citiwatts calculation modules, comprehensive heating and cooling strategies can be elaborated strategies at village, town, city, regional or national levels. Moreover, you can analyse scenarios for electric vehicle charging needs in cities and their surroundings and undertake simplified energy system analyses to study flexibility options.

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citiwatts Wiki structure

The citiwatts Wiki hosts the documentation, training materials and tutorial of the citiwatts toolbox. It consists of the following main parts:

1. General Functionalities & Structure

• Introduction To User Interface

• User Account (Registration, Log-In, Personal Layer Management)

• Layer Section In The Citiwatts Toolbox

• Select A Region In The Citiwatts Toolbox

• Retrieve Indicators Of A Selected Area

• Access To Calculation Modules

• Database Behind The Citiwatts Toolbox

• Data Upload Functionalities

• Data Export Functionalities

• Platform release notes

2. Datasets / Layers

• Methodology Of Data Collection

• Open Data Repository

3. Calculation modules (CMs)

• Heat Calculation Modules

• Cooling Calculation Modules

• Energy Sources Calculation Modules

• Industry Calculation Modules

• Mobility Calculation Modules

• Energy System Calculation Modules

4. Learning Center

• Tutorials and Training Materials

• Case Study Reports

5. For Developers

These sections (1-5) are accessible from all wiki pages via the sidebar on the left-hand side. The General Functionalities and Structure section guides the user through the interface of the toolbox. The section describes all general aspects of the toolbox, which are related to the user experience, e.g. navigating through different parts of the toolbox, layer selection, retrieving indicators, data upload and export functionalities etc. The Datasets section provides information about the dataset repositories as well as methodologies for gathering these data sets. The Calculation Modules section contains in-depth explanations of concepts and methodologies behind the calculation modules. Besides the descriptions of the methodologies, the provided examples and test runs for each calculation module help the user to obtain an understanding of input parameters and resulting outputs. Some calculation modules are integrated into the toolbox, while others are stand-alone. The section Learning Center helps users to understand and apply the citiwatts calculation modules and their combinations (so-called toolchains) to derive scenarios for certain aspects:

• Heating and cooling planning

• EV-mobility

• Flexibilities in the energy systems (identified with simplified energy system analyses)

Here, also training materials and case study reports are available. This section illustrates how different calculation modules can be used to analyse different aspects of the energy system and different research questions.

This heat planning toolchain is depicted schematically below:

The Developers section contains all information required for developers to contribute to the citiwatts toolbox or to understand how it works. It explains the IT infrastructure of the citiwatts toolbox, dataset integration, contribution in calculation module development, etc. The citiwatts Wiki is a living document, i.e. it grows as the citiwatts toolbox grows. The citiwatts developers continue updating the wiki pages by the introduction of new updates, improvements, functionalities, and calculation modules.

HAVE FUN EXPLORING THE CITIWATTS TOOLBOX!

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How To Cite

OpenGIS4ET Team, in citiwatts Wiki, Home page (August 2025)

Authors And Reviewers

This page was written by the OpenGIS4ET Team and namely by

PlanEnergi: Eva Wiechers

ModulDrei: Midjana Mujkanovic

License

Copyright © 2022-2025: OpenGIS4ET team

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 International License.

SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-4.0

License-Text: https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html

Acknowledgement

The project “Open Geographic Information System for Energy Transition” (OpenGIS4ET) has been supported by the ERA-Net Smart Energy Systems (Project Number 111 786) via financing from the contributing national agencies:

• Energy Technology Development and Demonstration (EUDP), Denmark (Project No.: 64021-6026),

• Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, Germany (Project No.: 03EI4050B),

• The Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), Austria (Project No.: 889031),

• Swiss Federal Office of Energy (SFOE), Switzerland (Project No.: 502364).

The OpenGIS4ET project builts on the H2020 Hotmaps Project.

Disclaimers

The content and views expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinion of the ERA-Net SES initiative. Any reference given does not necessarily imply the endorsement by ERA-Net SES.

The citiwatts toolbox is a living platform: As the research project as well as its sister and follow-up projects evolve, (new) functionalities are refined and bugs are addressed and solved. The toolbox is hosted in two environments: the development server and the production server. The development server has the most up-to-date version, with most of issues and bugs solved, but it might be unstable as developers keep working on it daily. The production server instead is a stable environment.

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