The Toolchain Approach: Conducting Scenario Assessments in the citiwatts platform

What is a Toolchain in citiwatts?

The citiwatts toolbox contains a large variety of default datasets and calculation modules (CM). All of these can be used as they are for certain purposes and analyses. However, linking these and using output from one CM as input for another can create added value and extend the applicability of the toolbox for your energy analyses. We call the chaining of components "toolchains".

The toolchain concept in the citiwatts tool is our way to give you examples of how to select different elements and components of the tool, including (default) data and calculation modules. For all calculation modules the toolbox provides default datasets for an initial screening.

We encourage you to explore the different modules and create toolchains that fit your field and needs. If available, feel free to use your own bottom-up data (e.g. for heat demand or resources for district heating) in the analyses. The approaches to use uploaded data is demonstrated in our webinar-series.

Example Toolchain: Heat Planning

Heat_toolchain_citiwatts

The heat planning toolchain serves here as an example. The overall goal of this toolchain is to evaluate the borders between areas where it is feasible to develop district heating and those where it isn’t.

The first step is to map the heat demand and gross floor area data available in the toolbox. These data can be adapted in the Scale Heat and Cool Density Maps. This feature is valuable if you for instance have local data for the total heat demand and wish to quickly scale it to a platform-compatible resolution.
A rough estimate of the district heating potentials in the calculation module District Heating Potential: Economic Assessment is found in the second step.
Afterwards, the possible supply option(s) for these areas can be evaluated in the calculation module District Heating Supply.

All these steps are performed in the browser-based platform itself. However to feed the results of the different calculation modules, we have also prepared a spreadsheet called “Scenario Assessment”. The spreadsheets for the example-toolchains can be found on the corresponding pages for the different planning aspects. Please see these spreadsheets for inspiration on how to structure the inputs and outputs from the platform for further analyses.

🧑🏼‍🏫 eLearning Center: Webinars and Training Materials

The citiwatts toolbox was developed in the OpenGIS4ET-project. For this project, an eLearning class was conducted, in which four energy planning topics were addressed in a series of four webinars (1 Introduction, 2 Heat and Cold Planning, 3 EV and Charging and 4 Sector Coupling and Flexibility).

There are prepared training materials and demonstrations for four topics of energy planning that are currently possible in the citiwatts toolbox. Each topic contains:

A Tutorial (intro-video)
A Webinar recording from an eLearning class (detailed presentation in the webinars for the corresponding calculation modules)
Presentations and scenario assessment spreadsheets (application of the datasets and calculation modules incl. exercises)

The eLearning Class was kicked off with an introductory webinar, which you can find on our Youtube-Channel (click on the picture):

Download the presentation for this introductory webinar: 20250403_citiwatts_eLearning_I Introduction.pdf

Tutorial-videos, Toolchains and eLearning-Materials

Please check out the corresponding sub-pages to explore these topics in more details:

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Final remarks

How To Cite

OpenGIS4ET Team, in citiwatts Wiki, Toolchain Approach page (August/September 2025)

Authors And Reviewers

This page was written by the OpenGIS4ET Team and namely by

PlanEnergi: Max Guddat and Eva Wiechers

License

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, Project Number 111 786) has been supported by partners of the ERA-Net Smart Energy Systems and Mission Innovation through the Joint Call 2020. As such, this project has received funding from the

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.

For more details please refer to the About page of this wiki.

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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