The global energy transition is placing new and unprecedented demands on Distribution System Operators (DSOs) and grid providers. Alongside upgrades to grid capacity, processes such as digitization, capacity optimization, and congestion management are becoming vital for delivering reliable services.
Project Lifecycle Stage
Early Adoption
Project Special Interest Group
Grid Simulation and Modeling
Power Grid Model provides a calculation engine that is increasingly essential for operators in this new environment. It offers a standards-based foundation enabling real-time power systems analysis, simulations of electrical power grids, and sophisticated what-if analysis. In addition, it enables in-depth studies and analysis of the electrical power grid’s behavior and performance. This comprehensive model incorporates essential factors such as power generation capacity, electrical losses, voltage levels, power flows, and system stability.
Power Grid Model is currently being applied in a wide variety of use cases, including grid planning, expansion, reliability, and congestion studies. It can also help in analyzing the impact of renewable energy integration, assessing the effects of disturbances or faults, and developing strategies for grid control and optimization.
Power Grid Model offers an independent open technology base that speeds and simplifies development of critical Power System technologies for DSO’s and related organizations.
Hosted by the Linux Foundation Energy, The Power Grid Model is now a vibrant Open Source project with a diverse, active and growing community, consisting of DSO’s, universities, research institutes and commercial parties.
The project is constantly evolving through a vibrant community-driven development process, with future scope to extend the existing libraries and develop more complete open-source applications. As part of this secure ongoing development, continuous validation is conducted through a CI pipeline in GitHub Actions.
Through the community, field validation of the library has been performed against the Power Grid Model reference models in over 80 test cases.
The project consists of two main libraries: power-grid-model and power-grid-model-io.
The core power-grid-model library is the main calculation engine, optimized for speed, to support real-time modelling, machine learning and powerful predictive analytics. Written in highly efficient C++, the library also offers native shared-memory multi-threading to enable parallelization in batch calculations.
A choice of C-API (with dynamic shared object) and a user-friendly Python API offers flexibility for developers. While the library runs across platforms including Windows (x64), Linux (x64/arm64), and macOS (x64/arm64), and publishes binary Python packages in official PyPI.
The calculation core is a C++ header only library. This is wrapped by a C-API providing direct access with dynamic shared object support for C-API developers. The C-API is then wrapped into a Python API to provide a more user-friendly option for Python developers.
The calculation core is thoroughly tested by its own unit tests and validation tests. While the model can also be validated on the Python side with the same test data.
More in-depth information on Power Grid Model can be found here: https://power-grid-model.readthedocs.io/en/stable/.
The power-grid-model-io library is a data conversion Python library to speed and simplify integration of Power Grid Model into broader system environments. This handles the conversion between the Power Grid Model format and other common grid data formats, with current support for conversion from Vision and pandapower.
More in-depth information on the data conversion library can be found here: https://power-grid-model-io.readthedocs.io/en/stable.
The power-grid-model-ds library extends the core Power Grid Model calculation engine with a high-level, Pythonic modelling and simulation interface for data-science applications. It defines a Grid dataclass that manages the consistency of the entire network and enables seamless integration of advanced analyses, such as network topology exploration, path and cycle detection, and connected-component checks, directly within data-science workflows. Built on the same performant C++ core as Power Grid Model, PGM-DS exposes essential power-system calculations (power flow, state estimation, short-circuit) through a lightweight Python API, allowing for large-scale batch simulations and rapid prototyping of grid-optimization algorithms.
Key Features:
Power Grid Model offers a powerful stand-alone calculation engine. Using power-grid-model-io, it can be easily integrated into any broader systems architecture, with out-of-the-box integration modules for Vision and pandapower.
For organizations looking at building full active congestion management systems, Power Grid Model now forms part of a more comprehensive open source tool suite hosted by LF Energy.
Used together, the suite enables DSOs to create end-to-end smart energy software platforms stretching from capacity forecasting, through advanced modelling and calculation, through to intelligent grid-edge mitigation and the implementation of reactive market pricing for steering supply and demand.
The LF Energy Power Grid Suite also incorporates:
OpenSTEF uses machine learning for accurate short term forecasting grid load and generation: based on measurements, weather forecasts, pricing on the energy market and other determining metrics.
Shapeshifter offers a framework and libraries for building Smart Energy trading platforms based on the Universal Flex Trading Protocol (UFTP).
Resources
Power Grid Model has completed an independent security audit, and all three findings are fixed. The audit was performed by Shielder, coordinated by the Open Source Technology Improvement Fund (OSTIF), and sponsored by LF Energy. Security audits of this type are a helpful tool in ensuring the safety and security of open source technologies being…
LF Energy welcomes new members AZX, EcoPhi, and Empa; launches the AINETUS, URPX, and CUPID projects; advances Power Grid Model to Early Adoption; and highlights a TenneT case study demonstrating a 10x performance improvement using PowSyBl. Recent releases across EVerest, OperatorFabric, FlexMeasures, and other projects underscore continued momentum across the LF Energy ecosystem.
Summary Signal: Presented at the LF Energy Summit Europe 2025: At the Summit, Peter Salemink and Jaap Schouten from Alliander introduced Power Grid Model DS, a new open source toolkit designed to simplify data science workflows for distribution system analysis. Developed within Alliander and now contributed to the LF Energy ecosystem, the project bridges the…
TL;DR (Dateline: October 2025 – LF Energy Summit) At the 2025 LF Energy Summit, experts from Accenture and Artelys — including Jannis Kahlen (Accenture, Netherlands), Nicolas Omont (Artelys, France), Gladys Leon (Artelys España Soluciones Analíticas S.L., Spain), and Jordanno de Assuncao Paiva (Accenture, Germany) — presented the session “Open-Source Congestion Management: Future-Proofing Solutions for the…
LF Energy is pleased to announce the release of Power Grid Model v1.12.0, the latest version of our high-performance, open source library for power system analysis and simulation. This release delivers significant enhancements to state estimation, improved documentation, critical bug fixes, and a number of internal optimizations that improve performance and maintainability. 🚀 Key Highlights…
On 16 May 2025, the LF Energy Power Grid Model (PGM) community gathered at Delft University of Technology for the first-ever full-day meetup. With 80+ participants joining both in person and online, the event combined hands-on technical workshops, an interactive hackathon session with four collaborative projects, and a vibrant afternoon of presentations and networking. The…
The LF Energy Power Grid Model maintainers are excited to announce the v1.11.x release series of Power Grid Model, including support for asymmetric lines and more extensive support for power flow calculations with automatic tap regulation. Highlights Added support for asymmetric lines (see #720 and the documentation). Added support for power flow calculations with automatic tap regulation with…
Distribution System Analysis Using Power Grid Model - Peter Salemink, Alliander
7th Power Grid Model Meetup - 2026
June 4, 2026 9:51 am