Introduction

Hi! Welcome to the ACES-Dashboard repository.

This repo is one of three related to the Atlantic Canada Energy System (ACES) Model. The others are:

• The ACES-Temoa repository contains the code for the energy system planning model, based off Temoa.
• The ACES-Data repository contains the data files associated with the ACES Model.

The dashboard is still in a beta version. Feel free to flag issues and we'll do our best to make improvements and patches. Otherwise, please feel free to get in touch @ cameron@sutubra.ca.

Usage

Getting the dashboard up-and-running

To use the dashboard, you will first need to activate the ACES environment, which you would have installed from the ACES-Temoa repository.

To fire up the dashboard on your machine, use the following command in a terminal / command prompt:

python Dashboard.py -i <input filename> -p <plot type> [--super]

where

• <input filename> is the filename of the .sqlite database you wish to visualize.
• <plot type> is one of:
  • emissions to generate the emissions dashboard
  • capacity to generate the dashboard for capacity and activity
  • flow to generate the dashboard for the hourly dispatch
• --super is an optional flag for the capacity plot types. This flag will result in similar technologies being grouped together and aggregated in the plots.

Afer a moment, a url will appear. Simply paste this url into your web browser. Please visit the Dash website for more details.

Changing technology colours and other attributes

Information from the sqlite database (<input filename>) is used to generate certain plot features.

Specifically, the "technologies" table contains the following attributes used by the dashboard:

• the "sector" and "subsector" attributes are used to group technologies together for sorting.
• the "tech_desc" attribute is used in the plot legend.
• the "tech_category" attribute determines if and how technologies are aggregated when the --super flag is included in the capacity plots.
• the "cap_units" attribute is used as the y-axis unit, when relevant.
• the "color" attribute is a HEX color used in the plots
• the "plot_order" attribute is an ordinal ranking where the technology should appear in the stacked plots -- the higher the number, the higher in the stack the technology will be plotted.