pandapower: Tools for Automated Grid Planning

Safe position for the future through sound grid planning

The variety of tasks and the scope of tasks in grid planning have increased considerably in recent years. Due to the energy transition, new regulations, changing subsidy conditions for renewable generation or the development of storage systems and sector coupling (electricity / heat, electricity / mobility, ...), the uncertainties regarding extend as well as time horizon of grid expansion demands are increasing. In addition, new assets such as MV/NV-transformers with OLTC or new requirements (e.g. charging stations for e-mobility) enlarge the solution space and increase complexity. Therefore, in the future increasingly extensive grid planning tasks must be processed or existing grid plans more often adapted and revised. This increases the quantity in grid planning. At the same time, quality requirements are also increasing in order to fulfill the obligations to demonstrate the necessity of grid expansion measures for regulatory reasons and also to still allow for an efficient and cost-effective grid planning process within the company.

pandapower is a software system to support power system planning staff to meet these increasing demands for quantity and quality. pandapower enables (partially) automated creation, calculation and evaluation of many different solution variants in grid planning. In addition, for each solution variant, several scenarios can be calculated automatically, which differ, for example, in the penetration level of renewable generators to identify particularly robust results or grid expansion paths. This enables a higher "throughput" in the grid planning process with simultaneously achieving more robust results in higher quality. pandapower can be applied in complex grid studies as well as in the usual planning process using specific modules and interfaces for integration in in the existing planning environment (tools, data, ...).

Automated grid expansion planning and optimization with panda<b>power</b> Pro
© Fraunhofer IEE
Automated grid expansion planning and optimization with pandapower Pro

Publications

 A. Scheidler, L. Thurner and M. Braun

“Heuristic optimisation for automated distribution system planning in network integration studies”

IET Renewable Power Generation, vol. 12, no. 5, pp. 530–538

April 2018

M. Braun et al.

“Verteilnetzstudie Hessen,” 2018. [Online].

https://www.energieland.hessen.de/verteilnetzstudie_hessen

Applications & Benefits

Automated calculation for a variety of alternative smart grid technologies and / or alternative grid planning principles for many real grids

  • to generally investigate and evaluate the suitability of different technologies or alternative grid planning principles for different grid areas
  • to identify simple criteria for the identification of grid areas where the use of certain technologies or alternative grid planning principles is promising

A large number of studies for grid operators (including Bayernwerk Netz GmbH, Netze BW GmbH, or Romande Energie SA) have already been carried out with pandapower on various tasks, e.g. the use of tap changer transformers, reactive power control methods or the use of meshing.

Applications & Benefits

  • Automated calculations of many alternatives / variants (manually not possible or not realistic)
  • Integration into the "standard planning process" (i.e. with little to no additional effort for the grid planner)
  • Automated integration of multiple data sources with end-to-end standardized quality control & assurance processes
    • Prevention of input and transmission errors
    • Comprehensive and clear visualization and evaluation of essential grid conditions
  • Automated co-creation of the necessary documentation

pandapower includes specialized modules for automated grid planning, for extended grid analyzes and investigations of various grid operating procedures, converters, for export / import to many commercial grid planning systems, for the definition of scenarios (e.g. increase of RE plants) and for the definition of planning principles, cf. following illustration.

pandapower builds on the proven open source framework pandapower for network calculation and network analysis.

Pandapower is jointly developed by the Fraunhofer IEE and the Department of Energy Management and Power SystemOperation at the University of Kassel (https://www.uni-kassel.de/eecs/en/sections).

Modules and functionalities of pandapowerpro and the open source framework pandapower
© Fraunhofer IEE
Modules and functionalities of pandapowerpro and the open source framework pandapower