Webinar: LEAP2020 – a major new version of SEI’s platform for low emission development planning

About the event

This webinar was led by Charlie Heaps, the developer of LEAP, with the support of Jason Veysey, the developer of NEMO, and Silvia Ulloa, a researcher and LEAP trainer at SEI.

The webinar show-cased the new LEAP2020 software and demonstrated some of the software’s new features.

About LEAP2020

After more than 18 months of development, SEI will soon be releasing a major new version of LEAP: our flagship decision support system for integrated planning of energy, climate change mitigation and air pollution abatement.

The new version, LEAP2020, has significant new abilities designed to make it more useful for those developing low emission development strategies. Highlights include:

• Energy storage modeling coupled with more detailed and flexible modeling of seasonal and time-of-day variations in energy demand & supply: vital for examining the potential for variable renewables like wind and solar to drive deep decarbonization.
• A new optimization modeling framework called NEMO (the Next Energy Modeling system for Optimization), which supports modeling of energy storage, larger optimization problems, and can work with multiple free and commercial solvers.
• New visualizations of results important for mitigation analysis, including Marginal Abatement Cost Curves (MACCs) and decomposition analyses based on the IPAT/KAYA methodology.
• Capabilities for modeling the health impacts of indoor air pollution and for disaggregating results by age and gender: helping to show how energy strategies can contribute to broader sustainable development goals (SDGs).
• GIS-based mapping capabilities including the ability to create geographic projections of likely future emissions hotspots, which can be used to highlight the importance of environmental justice in energy planning.

These and other new capabilities have been added, all while improving the usability of LEAP, making it more accessible than ever to planners working on sustainable energy solutions.