On December 1, 2024, the Energy Storage Analytics team at Sandia National Laboratories announced the release of QuESt Planning, an open-source Python-based capacity expansion planning tool focused on energy storage systems. QuESt Planning is a long-term power system capacity expansion planning model that identifies cost-optimal energy storage, generation, and transmission investments while evaluating a broad range of energy storage technologies. This tool is part of QuESt 2.0: Open-source Platform for Energy Storage Analytics.
QuESt Planning leverages a Pyomo-based optimization model to find the cost-optimal mix of generation, transmission, and storage. Users can define energy storage technologies based on power and energy capacity cost, asset lifetime, round-trip efficiency, and other operational characteristics. The tool supports various scenarios and sensitivity analyses to explore different investment portfolios and pathways. It provides an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) that simplifies the process of input data upload, planning model setup, scenario construction, model execution, and results interpretation. For advanced users, QuESt Planning can also be run through command line scripts and customized to meet specific needs.
Planning for the future power system requires detailed techno-economic modeling and analysis to identify cost-optimal investment portfolios. QuESt Planning offers an optimization-based long-term power system expansion planning framework that allows users to evaluate several scenarios and develop optimal portfolios that include a broad range of energy storage systems. This tool can assist regulators, utilities, states, and independent system operators in evaluating long-term energy storage solutions that are economic and support the evolving grid. Additionally, as an open-source tool, it is available to the research community for further development.
For further inquiries, please contact Cody Newlun.
For more information, please visit the QuESt Planning GitHub page here or the Sandia Energy Storage Analytics page here.
This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Electricity (OE), Energy Storage Division.
Sandia National Laboratories is managed and operated by NTESS under DOE NNSA contract DE-NA0003525.