QuESt Planning: A Long-term Power System Capacity Expansion Planning Tool Focused on Energy Storage Systems
v1.0.0
Key Features of QuESt Planning 1.0.0
Key features of the QuESt Planning tool include:
-
Optimization for Grid Investments: Leverages a Pyomo-based optimization model to find the cost-optimal mix of generation, transmission, and storage.
-
Energy Storage System Evaluation: Designed to evaluate a broad range of energy storage technologies and their role in the optimal mix of generation required to support system operations. Users are able to define energy storage technologies based on power and energy capacity cost, asset lifetime, round-trip efficiency, and other operational characteristics.
-
Model Flexibility: Supports various scenarios and sensitivity analyses to explore different investment portfolios and pathways.
-
Scenario-based Planning: Allows users to develop multiple scenarios to evaluate planning sensitivities and scenarios.
-
User-Friendly Interface: Simplifies the process of input data upload, planning model setup, scenario construction, model execution, and results interpretation.
-
Enhanced Visualizations: The QuESt Planning tool provides several visualizations of the optimization model results, including optimal resource expansion plots, costs breakdowns, and interactive maps.
Known Issues
- An issue where the graphical user interface may appear differently on local machines depending on operating system and screen resolution.
- An issue where the time to build the optimization model for larger models takes a significant amount of time. Consider using command line script for larger models.
- An issue where the candidate technologies and generation retirement schedules may cause errors when building the models and/or infeasibilities.
- An issue where certain optimization models can cause infeasibilities and/or significant solve times depending on the solver.