Facility

The UTOPYS facility is a large-scale computational infrastructure for power system research, combining a high-performance real-time simulation platform with a library of large-scale system models and high-quality synthetic datasets, enabling experiments that are not possible in the real world.

The facility is being built to be shared. Consortium partners, external academic researchers and industry will be able to apply to run experiments on it, and the models and data it produces are made available wherever the nature of the project allows. You do not have to be a power systems specialist to take part: the UTOPYS Library makes the infrastructure usable by mathematicians, computer scientists, economists, legal scholars and others whose work meets the energy system without first building that expertise themselves.

This page describes what the facility does, what you can use it for, and how to get access.

Inside the facility

Simulation core
RTDS NovaCor chassis operating in parallel, fully synchronised, sized to represent national-scale transmission networks in full three-phase detail. Hardware and modelling software are purpose-built for solving the differential-algebraic network equations of electricity grids in EMT detail, in real time.

Validated component library
The RTDS component library is validated by the manufacturer and includes models of the cables, transformers and equipment in service in real networks. Dynamic parameters are validated, so results can be trusted without the multi-year validation effort a general-purpose solver would demand.

Co-simulation environment
Because the simulation runs in real time, external elements can easily be synchronised with it rather than approximated inside it. These co-simulation capabilities will be rolled out gradually over the course of the programme, so not every interface will be available when the facility opens. Two categories connect:

1. Models and simulators: Power system models and simulation environments that represent the system itself, including its cyber layer: SCADA, OT and IT network models, market platforms, external energy system models, and other real-time power system models, including smaller simulations of individual mid- and low-voltage neighbourhoods.

2. Software: Algorithms and analytical layers that operate on the simulated system: control and trading algorithms, digital twins of substation equipment, and other computational layers such as AI/ML pipelines and autonomous agents.

Everything will be integrated into one coherent high-performance real-time environment. This is what makes it possible to study how a policy or market change propagates all the way down to the detailed physical behaviour of the grid.

What you can use it for

The facility supports any research where the power system sits at the core of the question. The facility provides a ground truth: a physically accurate account of how a large system actually behaves, detailed enough to show the mechanism behind an outcome rather than only the outcome itself.

Because the simulation runs in real time and can be reconfigured, your own models and algorithms can be interfaced with it at whatever scale the question requires, from a single device up to a national network. You can then observe how the system responds to what you have connected, and generate high-quality synthetic data from those experiments.

Broadly, the facility supports work in the following areas, some of which will become fully available as the co-simulation environment is rolled out.

• System behaviour and stability: How large, power-electronics-dominated systems behave under stress, including phenomena that only emerge at scale and cannot be reproduced in smaller laboratory setups.

• Control and operation: Developing and testing control, protection and dispatch strategies against a system that responds in real time, including wide-area monitoring and digital twin approaches.

• Cyber-physical systems and communication: How digital control, communication networks and data architectures interact with physical grid behaviour, including latency, data integrity and resilience to cyber-attack.

• Data-driven methods: Generating large volumes of high-quality synthetic data for machine learning and statistical methods, covering conditions that are unavailable, unsafe or impossible to measure in reality.

• Reliability and rare events: Studying faults, cascading failures and other rare events as often as an experiment requires, rather than waiting for them to occur on a real network.

• Markets, policy and regulation: Testing market mechanisms and regulatory instruments against realistic system dynamics, at a scale where the interaction between many participants becomes visible.

The UTOPYS Library

Every experiment benefits from the models and data that came before it. The UTOPYS Library is the collection of both, built alongside the hardware and made available for researchers wherever possible. It brings together validated models of individual components, models of larger systems assembled from them, and synthetic datasets capturing how those systems behave under scenarios worth studying, at a resolution and completeness that field measurement cannot reach.

The purpose is to lower the barrier to entry. Building a validated model of a large power system from scratch takes years, which in practice restricts this kind of research to groups that already specialise in it. Starting from a library model means the effort of an experiment goes into the question rather than the setup, and it means researchers from outside the power systems field, including mathematicians, computer scientists, economists and legal scholars, can use the infrastructure without first becoming power system modellers.

Access

The facility is currently being commissioned and the first model library is being built, so access is limited to consortium partners for now. The facility opens to external users from year three of the programme, with applications expected to open in 2029.

There will be three routes in. Consortium partners access the facility through a timeshare system. External academic researchers can apply independently, assessed on scientific merit with no consortium affiliation required, or partner with a consortium member and work on that member's share. Industry users can access the facility directly, or enter a joint project with one of the partner institutes and work with expert support. Across both external routes, a share of access time is reserved for users outside the consortium.

All requests will be screened in line with Dutch knowledge security policy. The full procedure, including rates, deadlines and the application form, will be published well before applications open.

Register your interest

Applications are expected to open in 2029. If you would like to be notified when they do, or want to discuss whether UTOPYS suits your research before committing to a proposal, leave your details and we will be in touch. Registering is not an application and commits you to nothing.