REFLOW: An Open-Source Workflow for Renewable Energy Potentials

The evaluation of renewable energy potentials is growing in importance across multiple sectors, including in energy planning, industry, research, and policymaking. Despite the abundance of research into regional-scale wind and solar potentials, the lack of reproducibility and transparent workflows consistently challenges validity. Typically, various steps in renewable energy potential assessments are conducted separately, often employing various software tools. For example, data processing may be conducted in a python environment, whereas land eligibility analysis utilizes Geographic Information System (GIS) software, and wind or solar simulations rely on specialized power simulation software. This fragmentation, as well as a general trend of not making data and code openly available, impedes efficiency, and hampers scientific reproducibility and transparency. Our research introduces a novel, Python-based open-source workflow to address this issue, which employs a pipeline management module (Luigi) for handling tasks and dependencies, and Docker to facilitate deployment. The Renewable Energy workFLOW (REFLOW) encompasses the entire process of potential assessments, from data acquisition to result validation, including critical steps like land eligibility assessment, explicit turbine placement, and wind or solar simulation. The workflow’s modular nature allows for integration of various software modules and methodologies, enhancing its adaptability to various scenarios. REFLOW can be executed in multiple operating systems and requires no significant programming knowledge. We demonstrate REFLOW’s capabilities for a wind power potential assessment of the North Sea region, conducting ocean eligibility exclusions, explicit turbine placings, and a simulation of wind power generation for a period of ten years, using data from the ERA-5 reanalysis and Global Wind Atlas. The entire workflow is fully reproducible, including all data acquisition and processing steps. Thus, REFLOW constitutes a significant step towards versatile yet reproducible renewable potential analyses.