Remote power is your biggest controllable cost. Optimise it, don't estimate it.
Off-grid sites live and die on the cost of energy: diesel hauled up a haul road, gas on a take-or-pay contract, or a renewables-heavy hybrid that has to survive a cloudy week. Levelised lets you model the whole site (power, process heat, even water) and find the least-cost mix with real optimisation, hour by hour across a full year.
Questions this answers
- What is the least-cost solar, wind, storage and gas mix for this site, and how many litres of diesel a year does it actually displace?
- At what delivered diesel price does a high-renewables hybrid beat trucked fuel over the remaining mine life?
- If we electrify the process heat load, what happens to the size and cost of the power plant, and does on-site hydrogen or thermal storage ever pay?
Renewables penetration claims for mine sites are easy to make and expensive to get wrong. The real question is what the firming costs: the storage, the gas or diesel that carries the still evenings and the wet-season weeks. Because Levelised optimises all 8,760 hours of a year, the firming requirement falls out of the solve, sized by the weather and the load, not by a rule of thumb.
Mines are not just electrical loads. Process heat, water treatment and, increasingly, hydrogen for green-metals processing all flow through the same energy balance. Levelised models any energy or mass flow on the same canvas, so the crusher load, the kiln and the borefield sit in one optimisation instead of three spreadsheets that disagree.
The engine is the open-source PyPSA framework with the HiGHS solver, and your model exports to open formats: hand the netCDF straight to your owner's engineer for due diligence, or step up to the paid tier for a generated Python script.
Run the numbers yourself
Lay out the site (load, fuel, renewables, storage, heat and water) and let the optimiser find the least-cost configuration. Free to build and solve.
Or start from the Mining & Metal Processing example : a complete, solvable model that opens straight in the app, no account needed.