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About the citiwatts toolbox

0 Welcome

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 gain initial and fast 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, much more comprehensive heating and cooling strategies can be elaborated for an area of your interest (village, town, city, region, etc.). Moreover, you can analyse scenarios for charging demands of electric vehicles in cities and their surroundings and undertake simplified energy system analyses to study flexibility options.

Citiwatts is the platform developed in the OpenGIS4ET project. It extended the H2020 Hotmaps platform, being a toolbox with database. The Hotmaps platform reached TRL-7. The OpenGIS4ET team improved the platform's usability and added additional tools, so-called calculation modules (CM). The target is to help authorities and other users to develop local, regional, and national heating, cooling, mobility, and sector coupling flexibility strategies, that are in line with Renewable Energies and CO2 emission reduction targets at national and European level. Newly developed calculation modules and functionalities were demonstrated by need-owners to reach TRL-8.

If you wish to come to the start page of this wiki, which describes its structure and content, please click on the logo in the header.

The consortium behind

Logos_consortium

The University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland (Haute école spécialisée de Suisse occidentale, HES-SO) coordinated the project OpenGIS4ET in which

  • the Institute of Informatics (II) and the Institute Energy and Environment (IEE) at HES-SO, Switzerland,

  • the PV-Lab at Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Neuchâtel, Switzerland,

  • the Energy Economics Group at TU Wien, Vienna, Austria and

  • the department for Sustainability and Planning at Aalborg University (AAU), Denmark,

worked on the technical improvement and extension of the online platform. During the project e-think from Austria and PlanEnergi from Denmark constantly gathered feedback from the users’ perspective when the platform was tested and demonstrated. So, it was continuously incorporated into the platform’s development. For this, they closely cooperated with two energy agencies: LandesEnergieAgentur (LEA) Hessen, Hesse / Germany and Energieagentur Steiermark, Styria / Austria. While testing, demonstrating and introducing the toolbox application in pilot areas the case study report in hand was developed. ModulDrei from Germany had the task of supporting the external project communication.

The funding received

Funding agencies

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.