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REopt Renewable Energy Planning and Optimization

NREL's REopt energy planning platform can help you understand the optimal mix of renewable energy and fossil fuels required to meet your cost savings, greenhouse gas reduction, and energy performance goals. The platform offers concurrent, multiple technology integration and energy optimization capabilities and can be customized for various applications, including screening single or multiple locations for renewable energy potential, and developing detailed operating strategies for dispatchable energy assets.

The REopt platform combines high-level site, resource, cost, incentive, and financial data to identify the most cost-effective ways to meet energy goals across a portfolio of sites. It provides a quick and low-cost screening method to identify the most economically and technically viable technologies for further study.

REopt can also be used to optimize existing energy systems at specific sites including buildings, campuses, and communities. This type of analysis typically requires more detailed data and provides insights on how to operate existing energy assets and incorporate new energy assets to reduce costs, meet energy or carbon goals, and improve resiliency. NREL continues to add new features to the REopt platform, including energy efficiency and renewable energy optimization, demand management, energy and water planning, and an application program interface (API).

Learn more about REopt in the NREL fact sheet, Renewable Energy Optimization (REopt).

Renewable Energy Screening

REopt can be used as an early screening tool to identify and prioritize renewable energy projects at a single site, or across a portfolio of sites in multiple cities, states, or countries, each with its own energy requirements, resources, goals, and constraints. REopt can:

• Identify the most cost-effective ways to meet agency energy goals by analyzing renewable energy resources, energy rates, and utility policies

• Simultaneously model the hourly interactions of multiple thermal and electric renewable energy technologies, along with conventional energy sources

• Provide a quick and low-cost method to identify the most economically and technically viable technologies for further study, including photovoltaics, solar hot water, solar ventilation preheating, wind, biomass, waste-to-energy, combined heat and power (CHP), energy storage, ground source heat pumps, diesel and natural gas engine generators, and landfill gas.

Once the REopt analysis is complete, the tool provides a ranked list of renewable energy projects for different potential scenarios and identifies the technology sizes that meet the defined goals at minimum cost, along with the optimal deployment strategies. It also estimates capital costs, operation and maintenance costs, and life-cycle costs for the recommended renewable energy technology (or combination of technologies), as well as the levelized cost of energy for each.

See how the U.S. Department of Energy's Federal Energy Management Program used REopt to illustrate the electricity consumption and renewable energy potential at 7,000 federal facilities.

Read about how NREL helps federal agencies reach new efficiency targets.

Campus Planning

REopt evaluates the least-cost pathways to achieve energy or carbon reduction goals on campuses. REopt provides improved operating strategies for existing energy assets and recommends additional renewable and conventional electric, thermal, and storage solutions. The analysis results in an optimized system architecture and operation strategy.

Microgrid Implementation

REopt evaluates how renewable energy and storage can be incorporated alongside conventional generation in microgrids to provide economic savings during grid-connected operation and meet critical loads during grid outages. REopt optimizes renewable and conventional generation and storage sizes as well as operating strategies for microgrid assets.

Energy Storage

REopt evaluates how energy storage can be leveraged for economic savings through demand reduction, time-of-use shifting, and participation in demand response programs, ancillary service markets, and frequency regulation markets. REopt looks at storage in integration with other energy assets and calculates system sizes and operating strategies to maximize economic benefit.

Resiliency Planning

REopt quantifies the energy resiliency impact of renewable energy and storage in energy systems. By injecting random outage occurrences and durations, REopt estimates the probability of the energy system surviving an outage of a given length. By comparing this probability in the base case system and the renewable energy storage system, the resiliency impact of renewable energy and storage can be quantified.

Support for Remote Villages

REopt analyzes cost-optimal paths to help remote communities reduce their fuel consumption and lower their energy costs through the use of high penetration renewable energy.

Learn more about NREL's custom detailed energy system analysis in the paper, REopt: A Platform for Energy System Integration and Optimization.

Contact Us

To learn more about using the REopt renewable energy planning and optimization platform for your project, contact Kate Anderson.

If you have an agreement with NREL or FEMP to conduct a REopt screening analysis of potential renewable energy opportunities, please download the REopt site screening form, complete the fields, and email the file to REopt@nrel.gov. Please use "Request for REopt Screening Analysis" in your subject line. We will get back to you within three business days to confirm receipt of data and discuss the schedule for analysis results.

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