Running GenX

This section describes how to run GenX with the examples provided in the repository and with user-defined cases. To have a deeper understanding of how to structure the input files and the settings, please refer to the User Guide.

Example cases

GenX repository contains several examples to get you started with GenX. These examples are located in the example_systems folder of the repository and are designed to be easy to run and to demonstrate the main features of GenX.

The available examples are:

• 1_three_zones
• 2_three_zones_w_electrolyzer
• 3_three_zone_w_co2_capture
• 4_three_zones_w_policies_slack
• 5_three_zones_w_piecewise_fuel
• 6_three_zones_w_multistage
• 7_three_zones_w_colocated_VRE_storage
• IEEE_9_bus_DC_OPF

To run an example, follow these steps:

1. Open a terminal and run Julia with an environment containing GenX;
2. Run the Run.jl file located in the example folder.

For example, to run the 1_three_zones example, you can use the following commands:

$ julia
julia> <press close-bracket ] to access the package manager>
(@v1.9) pkg> activate /path/to/env
julia> using GenX
julia> include("/path/to/GenX/example_systems/1_three_zones/Run.jl")

where /path/to/env is the path to the environment containing GenX and /path/to/GenX is the path to the GenX repository containing the examples.

The Run.jl file will read the .csv input files which define the system, the resources, and the policies, will solve the model, and finally will write the results in a results folder located in the same directory as Run.jl.

$ julia --project=/path/to/env /path/to/GenX/example_systems/1_three_zones/Run.jl`

For more information on what happens when you run a GenX case, see the Running GenX section.

Running GenX with user-defined cases

To run GenX with a user-defined case, you need to create a folder MyCase with the following structure:

MyCase
├── settings/
├── system/
├── policies/
├── resources/
├── README.md
└── Run.jl

where the settings folder contains the configuration files for the model and the solver, the system folder contains the .csv input files related to the system under study, the resource folder contains the .csv input files with the list of generators to include in the model, and the policies folder contains the .csv input files which define the policies to be included in the model. For instance, one case could have the following structure:

MyCase
│ 
├── settings
│   ├── genx_settings.yml           # GenX settings
│   ├── [solver_name]_settings.yml  # Solver settings
│   ├── multi_stage_settings.yml    # Multi-stage settings
│   └── time_domain_reduction.yml   # Time-domain clustering settings
│ 
├── system
│   ├── Demand_data.csv
│   ├── Fuel_data.csv
│   ├── Generators_variability.csv
│   └── Network.csv
│ 
├── policies
│   ├── CO2_cap.csv
│   ├── Minimum_capacity_requirement.csv
│   └── Energy_share_requirement.csv
│ 
├── resources
│   ├── Thermal.csv
│   ├── Storage.csv
│   ├── Vre.csv
│   ├── Hydro.csv
│   └── policy_assignments
|       ├── Resource_minimum_capacity_requirement.csv
│       └── Resource_energy_share_requirement.csv
│
└── Run.jl

In this example, MyCase will define a case with Themal, Storage, Vre, and Hydro resources, the system folder will provide the data for the demand, fuel, generators' variability, and network, the policies folder will include a CO2 cap, a minimum capacity requirement, and an energy share requirement, and the settings folder will contain the configuration files for the model.

The Run.jl file should contain the following code:

using GenX

run_genx_case!(dirname(@__FILE__))

which will run the case using the default solver. To use a different solver, you can pass the Optimizer object as an argument to run_genx_case! function. For example, to use Gurobi as the solver, you can use the following code:

using GenX
using Gurobi

run_genx_case!(dirname(@__FILE__), Gurobi.Optimizer)

To run the case, open a terminal and run the following command:

$ julia --project="/path/to/env"
julia> include("/path/to/MyCase/Run.jl")

where /path/to/env is the path to the environment with GenX installed, and /path/to/MyCase is the path to the folder of the MyCase case. Alternatively, you can run the case directly from the terminal using the following command:

$ julia --project="/path/to/env" /path/to/MyCase/Run.jl

What happens when you run a case

Added in 0.3.4

The entry point for running a GenX case is the run_genx_case!("path/to/case") function, where path/to/case is the path to the case directory that contains the .csv files with the inputs for GenX and the settings folder with the configuration files.

The following are the main steps performed in this function:

1. Establish path to environment setup files and GenX source files.
2. Read in model settings genx_settings.yml from the example directory.
3. Configure solver settings.
4. Load the model inputs from the example directory and perform time-domain clustering if required.
5. Generate a GenX model instance.
6. Solve the model.
7. Write the output files to a specified directory.

After the script runs to completion, results will be written to a folder called results, located in the current working directory.

Precompile GenX

Added in 0.4.1

However, if you want to disable precompilation, you can set the environment variable GENX_PRECOMPILE to "false" before loading GenX:

$ julia --project="/path/to/env"
julia> ENV["GENX_PRECOMPILE"] = "false"
julia> using GenX

Here, /path/to/env is the path to the environment where GenX is installed.