Workshop Summary:

February 2025 | Hosted by G-PST, Breakthrough Energy, Sequoia, TNO, and ESIG

In February 2025, over 40 experts including representatives from three power system operators gathered for a two-day workshop focused on improving interoperability among power and energy system planning tools. The event provided a forum to share current practices, challenges, and research, exploring steps to enable seamless data sharing and enhance integrated planning across modeling tools.

Day 1: Connecting Planning Tools Across Domains

The first day explored opportunities and challenges in linking planning tools from different modeling domains. Morning sessions showcased motivating examples of integrated workflows used by operators, agencies, and researchers. The afternoon focused on potential solutions and enabling technologies, drawing on lessons from energy standards and peer software ecosystems. While these workflows were promising, participants noted they still require significant manual effort to move data between tools. There was broad agreement on the value of integrated system planning and a shared interest in collecting comparative data to demonstrate its benefits. Attendees also recognized that different decision contexts require different model linkages, with varying priorities for system operators versus policy analysts.

Day 2: Interoperability Within Capacity Expansion Planning

The workshop’s second day shifted to interoperability within a single modeling domain: long-term capacity expansion planning. Presentations came from both data curators and tool developers, highlighting efforts to improve dataset portability across a diverse set of 14 capacity expansion models, including proprietary and open-source tools. Although these models share fundamental data needs, their design reflects varied assumptions and decision priorities. The group viewed this diversity as an asset and concluded that focusing on dataset portability is more practical than standardizing on a single tool. They also noted that a common data model could improve dataset discoverability and accessibility.

Day 3: Defining Common Data Representation

A smaller group of data and tool developers met on the third day to discuss next steps toward a common format for capacity expansion model inputs. Key objectives identified included:

  • Simplifying dataset ingestion to reduce repetitive manual work

  • Promoting data portability to avoid software lock-in and encourage innovation

  • Lowering barriers for new users with limited resources or technical expertise

The group also highlighted potential benefits like enabling multi-model comparisons and reproducibility of studies. They agreed that initial buy-in from leading tools and data providers is essential for progress, and that the standard should be easy to adopt and deliver immediate value, potentially through reusable tools and reference implementations. Participants stressed the importance of near-term wins, even if full interoperability takes longer to achieve. They also discussed developing a standardized output data specification for visualization and postprocessing, with opportunities to align this with production cost model standards.

Next Steps

G-PST’s Pillar 5 on Open Data and Tools will host ongoing virtual collaboration sessions to refine strategies and technical plans. Smaller core teams will develop proposals for feedback from the wider stakeholder community. In parallel, representatives will prepare detailed comparisons of capacity expansion model inputs. Future in-person meetings may follow as the initiative and community grow.

Explore presentations from the summit:

Day 1: Establishing the need and understanding the challenge

Technical Primer Briefing (Carlo Brancucci, encoord)

Why – Motivation and value proposition

What – Emerging research examples

How – Enabling technologies

Who – Collaboration and governance across institutions

Day 2: Capacity expansion input interoperability

Introduction to interoperability (Juha Kiviluoma, VTT)

Data curator perspectives

Tool lightning roundtable

  • Antares (Antoine Oustry, RTE)
  • BID3 (Daniel Levie, Afry)
  • Calliope (Ivan Ruiz Manuel, TU Delft)
  • COPPER (Madeleine Seatle, UVic)
  • GenX (Greg Shivley, Princton)
  • FlexTool & SpineOpt (Juha Kiviluoma, VTT)
  • OSeMOSYS (Vignesh Sridharanm, Imperial)
  • PSO (Russ Philbrick, Polaris)
  • PyPSA (Max Parzen, OET)
  • SAInt (Carlo Brancucci, encoord)
  • Sienna\Invest & ReEDS (Gord Stephen, NREL)
  • Tulipa (Germàn Morales Espana, TNO)

Existing efforts and lessons learned