Nordhausen

solph v0.6.3: The 2026.02 user meeting retrospective release

Last week, some of us were in Nordhausen (Thuringia) visiting both, the oemof user meeting and the parallel RET.con. As the latter is addressing a broader audience, we tried to also shape the user meeting to welcome novices and interested students.

As an artefact of this meeting, we just released solph v0.6.3 (GitHub, Zenodo, PyPI), that just implements some quality of life improvements. (Tutorial sessions can be a great opportunity to learn about unnecessary barriers that nobody ever reports.)

The parameter nominal_capacity now has an input validation. (We have seen people putting time series, which is currently not supported.)
Argument infer_last_interval of the EnergySystem now tries to infer the interval also if DatetimeIndex.freq is not explicitly set. This simplifies using time indexes from input data.
We added a tutorial focusing on time indexes and aggregation. (Note that some of the described features are experimental and subject to planned changes.)
You can now access results using Results.get(key, default). This way, the Results object is more similar to a dict. We believe it to be easier to use this way.

Another result of the meeting is a new task interest group that will work on saving/loading energy systems and results. The aim is to simplify exchange of data without passing around Python scripts to be able to reproduce insights and findings.

PS: It was mentioned in the local news (nnz-online.de, in German), that we promote transparency and openness in energy research. nice to hear that these topics are recognised to be relevant for the general public.

Join the upcoming oemof meetings

In just a bit more than a month the next oemof user meeting takes place in Nordhausen parallel to the RET.Con conference. From February 11 to 13 you can join us. You will have the chance to exchange with other oemof users and developers, learn something new in the tutorials and also connect with the participants of the RET.Con. Also, the general assembly of the oemof association will be held at the event. For registration and agenda details check out the wiki page on github: https://github.com/oemof/oemof/wiki/Meeting-2026.02

Two months later the second TESPy meeting will be hosted at the TU Braunschweig from April 13 to 15. We plan some tutorials and many hackathons to work on a couple of open issues and potential new features. Get all the information here: https://github.com/oemof/oemof/wiki/Meeting-2026.04%3A-tespy-user-meeting

Save the date: oemof user meeting 2026.02

Our next in-person user meeting will take place in Nordhausen from 11th to 13th of February 2026. It will be hosted by Nordhausen University of Applied Sciences partly parallel to the 9th Regenerative Energy Technology Conference (page in German).

We are posting this save the date already, as the parallel RET.Con also allows to submit contributions to its proceedings. If you wish to do so, please send an abstract (maximum two pages A4) to ret@hs-nordhausen.de. The deadline for abstracts to the RET.Con is the 15th of October. If accepted, full papers will be due at the 15th of January. Registration to the oemof track will be possible later, (as usual) without abstracts and proceedings.

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.

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.

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.

Tag: Nordhausen