Open-Use Movement

From build-first to use-first. Models are not fixed assets; they are living environments that hold resource and behavioral knowledge—and should be used to enhance thinking.

Why this movement?

Fossil fleet phase-out and retrofits. Large-scale wind/solar build-out. Hydrogen from curtailed power. EV charging and V2G and their impact on supply and transmission. Electrifying industry and buildings and the knock-on effects on seasonal and diurnal peaks.

These are the questions practitioners bring to energy system models. To answer them credibly, a model must see both the WHEN and the WHERE of system stress while remaining solvable fast enough to support active exploration. Yet, even after four decades of development, most country models are still assembled as one-off craft projects: each team starts again from raw data, spends months on cleanup and mapping, and produces an artefact that is hard for others to reuse or maintain.

What a useful model needs (to be useful)

  • Existing fleet, precisely: unit/cohort detail for retire/retrofit choices.

  • High-resolution VRE & storage: hourly shapes (at least for stress periods) to capture the when.

  • Multi-region / grid representation: to capture the where.

  • Hydrogen & flexibility: regional routing, curtailed-power utilization.

  • Demand blocks + load profiles: industry, buildings, EVs; charging policies and V2G.

  • Flexible time & horizon: annual near term, longer periods later; adaptive timeslices.

  • Solvability: all that granularity—and solutions in hours—so you can truly explore.

What’s broken in the current “open” story

  • Reproducibility ≠ Reusability. Recreating a colleague’s workflow is not the same as using their insight. Rebuilding consumes months; building on should take minutes.

  • Blank slates everywhere. New users inherit bare frameworks rather than usable environments.

  • Complexity unmanaged. Rich detail overwhelms unless the environment is designed to manage it.

  • Everyone redoes the same data work. Each group processes the same global plant lists, weather data and statistics, inventing its own mappings and fixes. The result is dozens of slightly different foundations instead of one shared, well-documented base layer that many models can build on.

Managed complexity enlightens; unmanaged complexity overwhelms.

—The Veda ethos

What “Open Use” means

Open Use is the commitment to publish decision-grade, pre-solved, shareable models that anyone can open, explore, and extend today—before they ever decide to rebuild anything.

With VerveStacks (VS) this looks like:

  • Freely available, ISO-level country models (100+ target countries).

  • Dual delivery:

    1. a model-agnostic, documented data dump, and

    2. a fully functional Veda–TIMES bundle.

  • Pre-solved online in Veda Online (VO)—no install, no solver management.

  • Assumption layers (“stacks”) you can toggle: WEO / NREL / NGFS, AR6 R10 climate categories, and more.

  • Stress-based timeslices: scarcity/surplus/volatility & “worst weeks” to keep physics while reducing size.

  • “Microscope mode”: import a capacity mix from any model and diagnose operational gaps (non-VRE flexibility needs) by slice and season.

  • A maintained “middle layer” between framework and study: VS acts like an operating system for ESOMs, turning raw global datasets into a consistent, documented starting point so that TIMES, OSeMOSYS, PyPSA and other frameworks can focus on questions rather than rebuilding inputs.

  • Cumulative improvement at the data layer: enhancements contributed by domain specialists—whether in nuclear, hydrogen, industry, buildings, or transport—can be evaluated and, when robust, folded back into the shared baseline so that future users benefit without having to re‑implement the same ideas in isolation.

Open Use doesn’t replace open source. It precedes it with a credible starting point, so openness is measured in time-to-insight, not just code availability.

Principles

  1. Use first, then build. Start from a solved, credible environment. Rebuild only where value accrues.

  2. Enumerated & layered assumptions. Multiple truths can coexist—choose stacks, don’t overwrite them.

  3. Adaptive time. Let the model see the hours that matter, not all hours equally.

  4. Transparent provenance. Every figure is traceable to source and transformation.

  5. Living, not frozen. When EMBER, GEM, NGFS, or ATB update, VS regenerates in hours, not months.

  6. Managed complexity. Veda makes layers, switches, and scenario families navigable and teachable.

What you can do today

  • Open a solved country model in VO, compare AR6 category scenarios, and share links with stakeholders.

  • Toggle assumption layers (e.g., WEO ↔ NREL ↔ NGFS) and re-run.

  • Use Microscope Mode: import an external capacity mix, get dispatchability & residual-gap diagnostics.

  • Fork inputs to add local knowledge; VS will regenerate the model cleanly on the next data refresh.

Positioning vs frameworks

  • TIMES + Veda: full multi-period structure, rich operations via stress-aware slices, and managed complexity for scenario families.

  • OSeMOSYS / PyPSA: VS provides model-agnostic data artifacts and can interoperate; use VS as the starting point or the microscope for external plans.

Crucially, VS is designed not only for expert model builders but also for analysts in ministries, regulators, utilities, and research organisations who currently have no practical way to use advanced models without first becoming builders themselves. Open Use aims to give this broader community a credible, pre-solved environment they can run, inspect, and adapt within a single working session.

FAQ

Is this open source? We publish open, documented artifacts (data + solved models) and the full assumption stacks. Pipelines will be modularized progressively; the ethos remains Open Use: your time-to-insight is the first product.

Why TIMES/Veda? Because when fed real structure, TIMES approaches specialist power-sector capability while retaining full multi-period depth. Veda turns that depth into navigable layers.

Is this only about power? VS starts with the power sector and extends to hydrogen, transport (EV/V2G), buildings, and industry—grounded in the same layered, regenerable philosophy.

Call to action

  • Practitioners: Open a model, ask a real question, share a link.

  • Contributors: Add datasets, improve mappings, extend modules—without breaking solvability.

  • Institutions & funders: Keep funding open models—and also fund open-use infrastructure that runs advanced frameworks and makes them free to use.