Major NWO grant to build world’s largest digital twin for energy-system studies

First-of-its-kind infrastructure

The new research infrastructure, often called a digital twin, will be the first of its kind worldwide. It will dynamically represent complex electricity systems, allowing researchers to simulate and study tomorrow’s grid before it is built. This capability supports realistic, repeatable experimentation on technical behaviour, market rules and resilience under a wide range of scenarios.

Necessity and urgency

Electricity systems worldwide face converging pressures. The electrification of transport, heating and industry is driving unprecedented loading and congestion. At the same time, distributed renewable generation (e.g. solar) and a fast-growing number of digital assets increase complexity and can threaten grid stability.

Added to this is the need for national autonomy and resilience, which calls for a fundamental rethink of how we design and operate energy networks. A secure, research-scale digital twin also makes it possible to explore low-probability/high-impact events and to test system robustness against malicious actors (including sabotage and physical attacks) in a safe environment.

Role of CWI

UTOPYS strengthens CWI’s role as a hub for methods and models underpinning the future of Dutch energy systems, and establishes a foundation for future research into decentralized AI techniques for electricity systems.

Professor Bert Zwart, head of CWI’s Stochastics group, serves as work package leader on mathematical challenges within the UTOPYS consortium. He emphasizes the long-term research value of the infrastructure:

From CWI’s Intelligent and Autonomous Systems (IAS) group, Professor Valentin Robu and Professor Han La Poutré are involved. Robu, a senior researcher in IAS, is planning to use UTOPYS to study emergent, self-organizing properties in energy systems and new forms of energy markets, such as real-time dynamics in markets with many prosumers.

He points out: “The UTOPYS infrastructure will allow us to model decentralized flexibility markets at large scale, and investigate new ways to tackle network congestion, a central concern for the power system in the Netherlands”.

La Poutré, a senior researcher in IAS as well as manager Research & Strategy at CWI, adds: “UTOPYS promises the largest practical impact of agent-based electricity markets research since I started working on these 17 years ago. But also, UTOPYS greatly contributes to CWI’s mission of generating new knowledge and conveying it to society.”

Leader in this field

The consortium already has experience building and operating smaller digital-twin environments. UTOPYS will scale these activities to a new level: entire countries can be replicated and analyzed, alongside technologies and systems that do not yet exist.

“The Netherlands is already a European leader in this field,” says project leader Peter Palensky from TU Delft. “Over the next decade, UTOPYS will advance that position by driving scientific breakthroughs in the understanding and management of complex energy systems. We are developing novel modelling approaches for complex, multiscale, and stochastic systems—methods also relevant to urban climate, water, and transport infrastructures.

Zwart highlights the consortium’s interdisciplinary strength: “What pleases me most is the collaboration: mathematicians, computer scientists, electrical engineers, economists and even legal scholars are involved. In writing the proposal and preparing the pitch, we grew into a real team.”

A landmark achievement

UTOPYS was ranked number one among all proposals submitted to the NWO LSRI programme. Through LSRI, NWO strategically invests in large-scale research facilities across the Netherlands, ensuring that they remain state-of-the-art or beyond, and extending their operational lifetimes to support future scientific breakthroughs.

Consortium partners

Partners in UTOPYS are: TU Delft, TU Eindhoven, University of Twente, University of Groningen, Utrecht University, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Radboud University and Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica. Cooperation partner is SURF: the IT cooperative of education and research.

Research Semester Programme 2027

The development of these infrastructure plans are aligned with a Research Semester Programme, taking place at CWI in the spring of 2027. The aim of this semester programme is to bring together the Dutch research community working on foundational issues in energy, and to establish CWI as a focal point for these efforts in the Netherlands. The proposal builds on several large national projects, especially UTOPYS.

EBRAINS

CWI is also a consortium partner in the EBRAINS-Neurotech project. More information about this project can be found in the full announcement from NWO.

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