retrospective

2025.09 dev meeting retrospective

For the last three days, we were meeting at HTW in Berlin for our semi-annual developer meeting. Here are some of the key results:

We plan to have an improved lecture/ tutorial session, that might eventually develop into a summer school.
There will be a release of oemof.solph mid November. It will include whatever is done until then.
Costs calculations in oemof.solph will be aligned with VDI 2067. We plan to distinguish between energy-related costs (€/kWh), capacity related operational costs (€/kW/a), fixed operational costs (€/a) for OPEX and capacity related investment costs (€/kW/a) as well as an investment cost offset (€/a) for CAPEX. At the moment, we group by units, and thus have CAPEX and OPEX mixed.
The SubNetworks, we decided to have at the oemof 2025.02 developer meeting are functional, an example is merged in dev.
There is a software implementing robust optimisation. We plan to release something along these lines (as rolph).
Some of use will create an awareness concept. For upcoming meetings, there will be an awareness team you can contact if you do feel uncomfortable because of other participants or externals. We will also try to organise ourselves so that you can feel save on your trip back to the hotel.

See you next time (in Nordhausen)!

2025.02 dev meeting retrospective

At the last developer meeting, in sunny Flensburg, we focused on decision making and drafting for the future development of solph. Here are the main results:

There is consensus that we should have common approach of facades or sub-networks. Currently, there are several similar implementations, namely facades in oemof.tabular, nested energy system object (used for cellular approaches, now removed), and node containers (in MTRESS).
We worked hands on at the documentation. Improvements will be merged to the v0.6 dev branch. We also have a suggested colour palette to use in examples:
Lapis Lazuli (#1F567D) , Cambridge blue (#8AA8A1), Pumpkin (#FA8334) , Rose (#FF006E), Icterine (#FFFD77)
We drafted a new class Results that will eventually replace the nested dict generated by solph.processing.results().
Before thinking about alternative back-ends to Pyomo, we should remove code duplication.

Group picture taken at the balcony of the FH Flensburg building near the habour.

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.

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.

User Meeting 2023-05: Photo

Part of the audience at the first day of the meeting watching a presentation by Uwe Krien

2021-05 user meeting: retrospective

"Group photo" mosaic of individual photos

In 2021 the third oemof meeting was held… online. Again 🙁 But we broke two records this meeting! First: 51 participants joined the sessions this meeting. Second record: This meeting was set up within 1 1/2 weeks (phew). Our speed-‘dating’ presentations included 11 upcoming projects and models from our community. Our this years social event contained Powerpoint-Karaoke where the future strategy of oemof was presented. Including: CryptoKitties, the generic formula for PROFIT! and our first oemof space project proposal! To have a peek on those, contact us 😉

2020-12 dev meeting retrospective

2020 – what a year – the second digital meeting was held in the internet 😉 We had more than 20 participants. The establishment of the oemof foundation is nearing completion. In this year’s social event a neighbourhood board game App was played in the Alpha. Due to the many bugs the challenge became a last-man-standing (winner: Patrik).

group photo of the virtual meeting as a mosaic of individual photos

2020-05 user meeting retrospective

In 2020 the first digital oemof meeting was held. Unfortunately, we failed to take a video conference screenshot to keep up the tradition of taking photos together. Maybe next time…On the oemof map, Bremen has now been populated as a new location. Despite the digital meeting, 26 participants from 13 different organizations came together. Bremen proclaims its right to the next analog meeting. Whenever that may be…

Biggest community ever at the anniversary developer meeting

The oemof community gathered from 4th to 6th of December 2019 for the developer meeting in the Beuth-Halle at Beuth University of Applied Sciences. Besides the celebration of oemof’s 5th birthday we intensely worked together (among others) on the further development of oemof libraries, the facades structure of components, rolling horizon approaches, GitHub Workflows and the improvement of the website. We gathered first ideas for an oemof foundation and shared experiences with paid support. We also decided the unbundling of oemof and solph, so that the next major release will be a v0.4.0 solph release. Apart from the intense work we celebrated oemof’s 5th birthday with a nice birthday cake and a funny presentation of the history of oemof’s development.

2019-05 user meeting retrospective

In 2019 Oldenburg celebrated its premier as a oemof meeting host. We had about 40 participants from 10 different organisations. New formats were presented like the speed poster season and an issue auction. (Note for further meetings: Noone wants energy drinks as price.)

Tag: retrospective