About

What GridSim is, who built it, and how to cite it.

GridSim is an open simulator of the electricity system in Great Britain. It is deterministic: the same inputs always give the same answer. I built it for research and for teaching. It runs the system hour by hour through real weather, and asks a practical question: what would a given mix of power stations need to keep the lights on?

I am Richard Lyon, and I write and maintain GridSim. More about me and my other work is at richardlyon.net.

Three sites, one system

GridSim is one of three sites I have built on the GB electricity system. Each looks at a different side of it:

  • Cost: subsidyclock.co.uk counts what the subsidies cost.
  • Risk: gridmargin.co.uk measures how exposed the system is to supply it cannot count on.
  • Behaviour: GridSim, this site, shows how the system copes with real weather and where it starts to strain.

How it is built

The model and its documentation describe; they do not argue. Interpretation goes in the Notebook, and every claim made there traces back to a number fixed in the model’s tests.

It also has to be something one person can keep running. That means one set of tools, one deploy, and as little live infrastructure as possible. So the site is built with Quarto, and the data is rebuilt from its public sources rather than stored on a server. An in-browser version of the simulator will follow once there is one I can maintain for the long term. Until then, the Run page has precomputed runs and the command to reproduce each one.

Colophon

Engine grid-sim v0.1.0

Author Richard Lyon

Code licence MIT OR Apache-2.0

Data licence CC-BY-4.0

Engine: github.com/grid-modeller/grid-sim · Site: Quarto, custom theme · Cited per CITATION.cff.

Built as a static site with Quarto and a custom theme. Typefaces: Space Grotesk for headings, Source Serif 4 for body text, IBM Plex Mono for data and sources.