About

The project, the trilogy, and the colophon.

GridSim is an open, deterministic simulator of the Great Britain electricity system, built as a research instrument and a public teaching tool. It exists to answer one kind of question: how does the GB system actually behave, hour by hour, in real weather — and what would it take for a given fleet to keep the lights on?

The trilogy

It is the third of three instruments on the GB energy system, each isolating one axis of the same question:

  • Cost — subsidyclock.co.uk: what the settlement costs.
  • Risk — gridmargin.co.uk: exposure to unreliable supply.
  • Dynamics — GridSim (this site): how the system behaves in real weather, and where it becomes fragile.

Why it is built this way

The instrument is kept neutral: the docs and the tool read as measurement, not argument. Interpretation lives in the Notebook, and even there every claim is traceable to a pinned number.

A second, equal constraint is that it must be solo-maintainable: one static toolchain, one deploy, minimal running infrastructure. That is why the site is Quarto, the data is fetched-and-built rather than hosted-and-forgotten, and the interactive tool is a stub until a version that can be maintained forever is ready.

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 typographic theme. Typefaces: Space Grotesk (display), Source Serif 4 (body), IBM Plex Mono (data and provenance).