pypsa-eur

PyPSA-Eur: A Sector-Coupled Open Optimisation Model of the European Energy System

PyPSA-Eur is an open model dataset of the European energy system at the transmission network level that covers the full ENTSO-E area and all energy sectors, including transport, heating, biomass, industry, and agriculture. Besides the power grid, pipeline networks for gas, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and liquid fuels are included. The model is suitable both for planning studies and operational studies. The model is built from open data using a Snakemake workflow and fully open source. It is designed to be imported into the open-source energy system modelling framework PyPSA.

[!NOTE] PyPSA-Eur has many contributors, with the maintenance currently led by the Department of Digital Transformation in Energy Systems at the Technical University of Berlin. Previous versions were developed at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology funded by the Helmholtz Association.

Among many other things, the dataset consists of:

• A power grid model based on OpenStreetMap for voltage levels above 220kV (optional above 60kV).
• The open power plant database powerplantmatching.
• Electrical demand time series from the ENTSO-E Transparency Platform.
• Renewable time series based on ERA5 and SARAH-3, assembled using atlite.
• Geographical potentials for wind and solar generators based land eligibility analysis in atlite.
• Energy balances compiled from Eurostat and JRC-IDEES datasets.

The high-voltage grid and the power plant fleet are shown in this map of the unclustered model (as of 1 January 2026):

For computational reasons the model is usually clustered down to 50-250 nodes. The image below shows the electricity network and power plants clustered to NUTS2 regions:

This diagram gives an overview of the sectors and the links between them within each model region:

Warnings

PyPSA-Eur is under active development and has several limitations which you should understand before using the model. The github repository issues collect known topics we are working on (please feel free to help or make suggestions). The documentation remains somewhat patchy. You can find showcases of the model’s capabilities in the Joule paper The potential role of a hydrogen network in Europe, another paper in Joule with a description of the industry sector, or in a 2021 presentation at EMP-E. We do not recommend to use the full resolution network model for simulations. At high granularity the assignment of loads and generators to the nearest network node may not be a correct assumption, depending on the topology of the underlying distribution grid, and local grid bottlenecks may cause unrealistic load-shedding or generator curtailment. We recommend to cluster the network to a couple of hundred nodes to remove these local inconsistencies. See the discussion in Section 3.4 “Model validation” of the paper.

Contributing and Support

We strongly welcome anyone interested in contributing to this project. If you have any ideas, suggestions or encounter problems, feel invited to file issues or make pull requests on GitHub.

• To discuss with other PyPSA users, organise projects, share news, and get in touch with the community you can use the Discord server.
• For bugs and feature requests, please use the PyPSA-Eur Github Issues page.

Licence

The code in PyPSA-Eur is released as free software under the MIT License, see doc/licenses.md. However, different licenses and terms of use may apply to the various input data, see doc/data_sources.md.