There's a very expensive process for resource planning the electrical grid that is highly modeling dependent. Most electricity grids are planned with a least cost expansion modeling approach. A small number of incumbent vendors provide expensive closed source tools to do this. There are quite a few open tools in this space, but open energy transition is building consensus around pypsa and pypsa-eur as equivalent top of class models (better in a lot of ways) to use for various IRPs.
Thanks, definitely positive they’re moving towards open and freely accessible modeling tools. I can see the benefits for students and budget-constrained institutions.