Norman Zielke

Activities

• Co-development of the Municipal Heat Planning Ontology (MHPO) for municipal heat planning
• Further development of the Open Energy Ontology (OEO)
• Scenario development for energy system modeling
• Investigation of the effects of simulations and optimizations of municipal heat planning at the distribution and transmission grid levels
• Application and further development of interfaces between eDisGo and eTraGo
• Modeling and analysis of integrated energy systems with a focus on electricity, heat, and grid infrastructures

Personal Information

Norman has been a researcher in the Transformation of Energy Systems Research Unit at the Reiner Lemoine Institute since May 2026. Prior to that, he began as an intern in the same unit in January 2024 and subsequently supported the team as a student assistant.

Norman wrote his master’s thesis at the RLI on the topic of sustainable and robust energy system modeling. In his thesis, he used the open-source framework eTraGo to model a sector-coupled municipal energy system and analyzed the robustness of a transition pathway using sensitivity analyses, particularly with regard to changes in investment costs.

His work focuses on ontology development and energy system modeling. One focus is on co-developing the Municipal Heat Planning Ontology (MHPO), which structures key concepts of municipal heat planning and makes them usable for data-driven applications. In addition, he is working on the further development of the Open Energy Ontology (OEO).

In addition, Norman is involved in scenario development for integrated energy system models. In particular, he investigates the interactions between heat planning, electrical distribution grids, and transmission grids. To this end, he works with the open-source models eDisGo and eTraGo and supports the further development of interfaces between the two modeling environments.

His research focuses on municipal heat planning, cross-sector energy system modeling, the analysis of electricity and heat infrastructures, and the development of reproducible open-source workflows.