Country-Wise Open Energy Planning in High-Resolution with PyPSA-Earth

The energy transition is a major challenge that knows no borders and requires a systematic change in the energy production, consumption and transport. These challenges can be effectively tackled only through collaborative efforts. Accordingly, to simplify cooperation and increase transparency for policy and technical decision makers, researchers around the world are developing open modeling tools. However, due to the high complexity, the modeling tools are often tailored to specific problems using regional-specific data and focusing on few countries. Consequently, contributions are often scattered and highly inflexible, leading to duplication of work, missed collaborations, and inefficiencies. The recent PyPSA - Earth model is a promising tool that enables energy system modeling with flexible spatial and temporal resolution. Until now, it has only been validated for Nigeria and Africa, hence lacking proof of Earth coverage. In this study, we extend the PyPSA-Earth methodology to enable energy modeling for nearly every country on Earth. Novel data cleaning, merging and modeling tasks have been performed to reach global coverage. Results confirm that PyPSA-Earth now covers approximately 99% of the world's population and can generate high-resolution datasets for national energy studies. This work lays the foundations for future endeavors in flexible energy modeling of arbitrarily large regions.