Why VerveStacks and How It Is Sustained

Many people ask two simple questions about VerveStacks:

  • Why are you doing this?

  • How will you sustain this over time?

This page explains the motivation and business model behind VerveStacks, and how they connect to the Open‑Use movement.

Why VerveStacks?

Energy system models have become more capable, but for many practitioners they remain hard to use:

  • Ministries, regulators, and utilities often depend on external teams for every serious model run.

  • Most “open” projects still rely on grant cycles and one‑off model builds that are difficult to maintain.

  • Teams repeatedly rebuild similar country models from raw data instead of sharing a maintained starting point.

VerveStacks exists to change this dynamic.

Rather than being a one‑time research project, VerveStacks is designed as real‑economy infrastructure:

  • Shared starting point: maintained, decision‑grade country models that can be reused and adapted.

  • Time‑to‑insight as the first product: users spend their effort on questions and interpretation, not on rebuilding inputs.

  • Open‑use, not just open source: what matters first is that practitioners can open, run, and understand models today.

The goal is cultural as much as technical: to make credible, well‑documented country models feel like standard infrastructure for energy and climate work, not bespoke artefacts that appear and disappear with individual projects.

How it is sustained

VerveStacks follows a simple principle:

professional users fund the ecosystem; everyone benefits from it.

Organizations with real analytical responsibilities — consulting firms, think tanks, government agencies, multilaterals — pay for:

  • Customization of VS models to their specific questions and country contexts.

  • Scenario design and large multi‑run experiments, including dashboard configuration and result curation.

  • Integration with internal datasets and workflows, so VerveStacks slots into existing decision processes.

  • Support, training, and capacity building for teams who depend on the models in their day‑to‑day work.

That professional revenue is reinvested into:

  • Keeping country models freely available and up to date as global datasets evolve.

  • Maintaining the assumption stacks, documentation, and examples as first‑class public artifacts.

  • Improving the shared data layer and methods, so all future users benefit from past work.

In this way, VerveStacks is not sustained by short‑term grants alone, but by ongoing use in real decision environments.

Why not rely only on grants and philanthropy?

Open‑source and philanthropic projects have played an important role in advancing energy modeling, and VerveStacks builds on many of their insights. At the same time, they often depend on funders who are not the day‑to‑day users of the models. Over time, this can tilt incentives toward visibility metrics — likes, downloads, stars, citations — rather than whether practitioners can rely on the models in real decisions.

VerveStacks takes a different path:

  • The people who fund it are the ones who use it under pressure.

  • Ministries, utilities, consultancies, and multilaterals pay for customization and scenario work because the models must perform inside their real workflows.

This alignment — funding by actual users whose work depends on the results — is what keeps attention on practical value: faster, more confident decisions with credible models. The free, open‑use layer (models, documentation, and educational resources) is built on top of that, so broader access grows out of real impact, not just visibility.

Closed pipeline, open outputs

To deliver consistent quality at scale, VerveStacks currently keeps the model‑generation pipeline managed and closed. This is a deliberate choice to:

  • Protect structural integrity of the models and data.

  • Avoid fragmentation into many slightly incompatible pipelines.

  • Iterate quickly on the internals without breaking users’ workflows.

At the same time, VerveStacks commits to keeping the outputs and artifacts open to use:

  • Country models (e.g. Veda–TIMES bundles and model‑agnostic exports).

  • Assumption stacks and documentation for methods, data, and calibration.

  • Use‑case examples and Veda Online access layers that let users work with pre‑solved cases.

You can think of it as similar to early GitHub: the product itself is managed, but the value it enables — models, documentation, and shared workflows — is open to the community.

For how this philosophy plays out in practice, see Open‑Use Movement.

Short answers to common questions

“Why are you doing this?”

Because there is a persistent gap between what advanced energy system models could do and what most practitioners can actually use. VerveStacks aims to turn what used to be project‑by‑project craft into a maintained, reusable layer of country models and documentation that many institutions can rely on.

“How will you sustain this?”

By aligning the business model with use: organizations that rely on deep analysis pay for customization, scenario experiments, and support; that revenue funds the free, open‑use layer (models, documentation, and educational resources) for the wider community.