Switch is a planning model for power systems with large shares of renewable energy that incorporates a condensed form of production cost modeling into capacity planning problems. The Switch Energy Planning model was originally written by Matthias Fripp as part of his dissertation at the University of California Berkeley in 2008. After Matthias graduated, he provided a copy to the the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at UC Berkeley to advance the work. Researchers at RAEL forked his codebase, writing new features and extending it to various regional studies. 

In 2012, Matthias published a public repository of Switch at https://sourceforge.net/projects/switch-model, releasing it under GPL v3. Subsequently, RAEL publicly released their fork under the same GPL license.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Switch is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 as published by the Free Software Foundation. Modified versions of Switch must include this notice and the AUTHOR ATTRIBUTION / CITATION notice below.

Switch is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with Switch.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

AUTHOR ATTRIBUTION / CITATION

In publications based on analysis conducted with Switch, please cite Matthias Fripp (2012), "Switch: A Planning Tool for Power Systems with Large Shares of Intermittent Renewable Energy", Environmental Science & Technology 46 (11), pp 6371–6378, http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/es204645c

In presentations based on analysis conducted with Switch, please cite the Switch project's website at http://www.switch-model.org

RAEL FORK AUTHOR ATTRIBUTION / CITATION

If you reuse the RAEL fork of the Switch code, also please cite the following study:

Nelson, James, Josiah Johnston, Ana Mileva, Matthias Fripp, Ian Hoffman, Autumn Petros-Good, Christian Blanco, and Daniel M. Kammen. "High-resolution modeling of the western North American power system demonstrates low-cost and low-carbon futures." Energy Policy 43 (2012): 436-447.

Other studies conducted with SWITCH include:

Wei, Max, James H. Nelson, Jeffery B. Greenblatt, Ana Mileva, Josiah Johnston, Michael Ting, Christopher Yang, Chris Jones, James E. McMahon, and Daniel M. Kammen. "Deep carbon reductions in California require electrification and integration across economic sectors." Environmental Research Letters 8, no. 1 (2013): 014038.

Mileva, Ana, et al. "SunShot solar power reduces costs and uncertainty in future low-carbon electricity systems." Environmental science & technology 47.16 (2013): 9053-9060.

Nelson, James; Ana Mileva; Josiah Johnston; Max Wei; Jeffery Greenblatt; Daniel Kammen. Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory, Energy and Resources Group, (University of California, Berkeley). 2014. Scenarios for Deep Carbon Emission Reductions from Electricity by 2050 in Western North America Using the SWITCH Electric Power Sector Planning Model. California Energy Commission. Publication number: CEC‐500‐2014‐109.

Sanchez, Daniel L., et al. "Biomass enables the transition to a carbon-negative power system across western North America." Nature Climate Change 5.3 (2015): 230-234.

de Leon Barido, Diego Ponce, et al. "Evidence and future scenarios of a low-carbon energy transition in Central America: a case study in Nicaragua." Environmental Research Letters 10.10 (2015): 104002.

Mileva, Ana, et al. "Power system balancing for deep decarbonization of the electricity sector." Applied Energy 162 (2016): 1001-1009.

He, Gang, et al. "SWITCH-China: A Systems Approach to Decarbonize China’s Power System." Environmental science & technology (2016).