Report from the anniversary meeting

The last days, we had our semi-annual meeting to discuss the state of open energy system modelling. This time in the flavour of a user meeting with a special 10-year celebration event. I am so happy that I can tell that the concept worked out: We had almost 40 guests, some of them were on their first oemof meeting. Still, they dynamically formed sub-groups for parallel sessions, had fruitful discussions, shared experiences, and eventually started implementing something together. To kick this off, we asked every participant to give a short pitch at the first day. This was quite a ride, but due to coffee breaks and a poster session in the DLR entry hall, it was possible to identify many persons you wanted to talk to later.

Group photo of those who stayed long enough on Thursday (after the 10-year celebration event). Unfortunately, we forgot to take a picture before.
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Save the date: 10th Anniversary Meeting in Oldenburg

At the end of this year, the open energy modelling framework will turn 10. The anniversary meeting will be held in Oldenburg from the 20th to the 22nd of November, 2024. The style will deviate from the standard developer meetings we typically have by the end of the year; it will be more like a user meeting.

To celebrate this special occasion, there will be three different locations, we will be visiting. Wednesday, we will be in the big seminar room of the DLR Institute of Networked Energy Systems, next to Campus Wechloy of Oldenburg University. This is the right place to give presentations for a bigger audience. For Thursday, we will move to the DLR site in down-town Oldenburg. We have several rooms reserved there to work in breakout groups. On Friday, we celebrate the developer part in the Mainframe Oldenburg, located next to Oldenburg central station. This place offers the perfect atmosphere for hands-on coding experiences.

More details will be collected at the corresponding Page GitHub:oemof/wiki/Meeting-2024.11:-10-years-of-oemof. We also have a preliminary agenda at the page already. Registration will open soon. To get to know each other, we agreed that everybody should be part of a contribution. This includes a wide range of possibilities:

  • Pitch (one static slide, one minute)
  • Presentation (five minutes up to 15 minutes)
  • Poster (A3 to A0), please do also give a pitch
  • Co-authorship (be named in a contribution of someone else)

To register, please write an email to meetings@oemof.org before 1st of November. Please tell your name, your institution, what kind of contribution you plan, the title of your planned contribution, and your nationality. (The latter is needed due to DLR regulations.) If you do not tell us something different, we will assume that listing your name, institute and contribution on a publicly available list will be okay for you. (Registration deadline has passed.)

2024 user meeting in Nordhausen: Thanks for joining!

The last user meeting was the biggest we ever had. We had very productive and inspiring discussions about using oemof (especially solph). Because of the size we gathered opinions in subgroups instead of making decisions about future developments in the plenary. Another reason for this also led to some other changes: Typically, we start with user presentations showing use-cases as well as open questions. This, however was scheduled as a point of the agenda of the parallel RET.Con. So, instead of gradually going to the core, we started with developer topics.

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oemof user meeting 2024.02

From 7th to 9th of Februar 2024, we will have our annual user meeting, this time held in Nordhausen. It is set in the framework of the to the  7th Regenerative Energy Technology Conference (RET.Con) and the 20th anniversary celebrations of the course renewable energy technology (“Regenerative Energietechnik”) at the Nordhausen University of Applied Sciences.

With the program of the RET.Con being released, we now also created a (tentative) agenda for the oemof meeting 2024.02. In contrast to previous years, we will have the topics targeting more experienced users (like planning the development roadmap) at the first day. This allows to have topics also targeting beginners (e.g. the user presentations) open for visitors to the RET.Con.

If you plan to come, please register writing an email to usermeeting@oemof.org, telling your name and (if applicable) your institution. We still have open slot for user presentations and tutorials. So if you want to present what you are doing using oemof or even share some hands-on experience, we will try to fit your contribution in. Note that it is okay to give a presentation in German. If possible, we prefer to have at least slides or spoken word in English. In the past, user presentations were also used for problem statements to find help on a particular topic and to have “reversed tutorials” asking for guidance. Both are options also for this user meeting.

As always, there are no fees for the oemof user meeting. You have to organise the trip (travel and accommodation) by yourself, meals are self-paid (and optional, you are free to organise something separate). So, don’t be confused by the RET.Con conference fee, this one does not apply for us.

2023-11 dev days: Retrospective

oemof developers discussing possible implementations

In the last days, we intensively discussed the next steps in the development of oemof. It was very intense and exciting to see other enthusiastic developers in person, drafting solutions at the white board and reviewing code in the presence of the persons who wrote it. We discussed long-term plans but also very particular problems, e.g. how to rewrite up-times in solph so that they are meaningful in models with time-steps of varying length. The most noticeable topics were mostly considering solph:

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oemof user meeting meets RET.Con

For next year’s user meeting, we take a special opportunity: It will be held from 7th to 9th of Februar 2024, partly in parallel to the  7th Regenerative Energy Technology Conference (RET.Con) in Nordhausen. The oemof user meeting will be in its established style, but we want to make it possible for attendees to the conference (which is held mostly in German) to visit presentations and tutorials given at the user meeting. Additionally, it is possible to add an entry for the proceedings of the conference.

This is also why we are announcing the user meeting already before the dev days have taken place: For the RET.Con, there is a deadline for abstract submission at the 30th of September 2023. Note that papers should be in German but presentations may also be in English. If you do not want to publish a paper, you can hand in a headline and a very brief summary for a talk until the 15th of November, so that an announcement can be made at the RET.Con. At last, of course you can ignore this early deadline and present something at the user meeting without having it announced at the conference.

If you want to want to submit something for the RET.Con via the oemof user meeting, please send an email to usermeeting@oemof.org. All emails to this address will also be forwarded to the organisers in Nordhausen.

oemof dev days – November 2023

We opened registration for the omof developer meeting 2023. (As suggested by the local organisers, Fraunhofer UMSICHT, they are now “dev days”.) The meeting will take place in the Osterfelder Straße 3 in Oberhausen from the 22nd to the 24th of November 2023. At the moment, the agenda is still blank and leaves plenty room for ideas. It will be continuously developed at https://github.com/oemof/oemof/wiki/Meeting-2023.11 – depending on suggestions from registrees.

We always try to keep the entry barrier as low as possible. The meeting is targeted to everybody who wants to contribute to oemof. Of course this includes the further development of the packages, but in the past there have been also non programming-related sessions, e.g. about the content of this website. We have no conference fee, you only have to organise and pay for travel, accommodation, and food. To register, please send an email to meetings@oemof.org or post a comment at https://github.com/oemof/oemof/issues/112.

oemof spring meeting 2023

we are pleased to announce the upcoming oemof user meeting, May 24th to 26th 2023 in Stuttgart. The meeting is open to all who use or develop the software, as well as interested new users. Thanks to the DLR site in Stuttgart for hosting us.

Being a community project, the meetings traditionally include the possibility to ask questions to fellow users and open discussion. We are happy to exchange ideas with developers and users rather than just promoting results. So let’s get together, share knowledge and inspire each other. Learn more about planned developments, find people to collaborate with on your projects and get your questions answered. We continuously gather information in the Meeting-2023.05 Wiki page (GitHub). Note that meals are self-paid as there is no conference fee.

To register, just write an email to meetings@oemof.org. Please tell your name, (if applicable) your institution, your GitHub user name, and if you want to present something. Unfortunately, we also need to know your nationality, so that you are allowed to enter the DLR campus.

What to expect?

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Things to come

Hack, eat, sleep, repeat: Our 2022-11 dev meeting was one big hackathon event where we joint forces to solve problems with the code. It was so intense, we even forgot to taka a photo. (We were some 15 very enthusiastic hackers.) There are a couple important decisions to be communicated:

  • The next release of solph (v0.5) is in feature freeze. We will just update the documentation and finalise making arguments explicit and release afterwards.
  • Multi-period optimisation and renaming Transformer to Converter will follow with v0.5.1 with a merge to mainline solph right after v0.5.0. The changed name will have a wrapper so it is not API breaking.
  • Stephan Günther, Caroline Möller, and Patrik Schönfeldt form the new board of the oemof association.
Letter to the register of associations

Also, today was an important day for the oemof association. After everything was agreed on by the general assembly on November 10th, 2022, the protocol as well as the statute were notarised and sent to the register of associations. By chance we also received the final documents needed to apply for our non-profit status. So, now we have to wait until things are processed until the association gets it final legal status.