CADET: Capacity Expansion Decision Support for Distribution Networks

NREL's Capacity Expansion Decision Support tool for Distribution Networks (CADET) gives distribution grid planners a consistent, defendable, and repeatable way to compare long-term distribution investment strategies.

As future load growth becomes more uncertain, grid planners need tools to help them identify right-size investments while accounting for new customer expectations and new options for managing load. 

What Outputs Does CADET Create?

CADET creates a set of investment strategies for grid planners to assess. Each investment strategy includes when different distribution assets should be installed, the cost of the investment strategy, and potentially, other co-benefits of the strategy. CADET is designed to be co-optimized with external and internal NREL tools to explore these co-benefits, which might include affordability, energy burden, social burden, resilience, hosting capacity, reliability, and more.

How Does CADET Work?

There are many potential use cases for CADET, so it was designed with a flexible software architecture. CADET uses NREL’s Grid Data Models on GitHub, a variety of options for representing distribution network model fidelity, and a combination of mathematical and heuristic optimization to enable this flexibility. 

Depending on the use case, CADET may help users decide when and where to invest in new substations, battery storage, customer demand response programs, tie-switches, and more. Each set of solution strategies will be accompanied with validation results for further assessment and aims to help grid planners prepare consistent, repeatable and defendable results that enable constructive stakeholder engagement.

Potential Use Cases for CADET

• Synergies and trade-offs between capacity investments that impact resilience, reliability, and affordability
• Least-cost, budget constrained strategies for voltage class upgrades
• Capacity investment requirements for utilities transitioning away from natural gas
• Cost benefit analysis for the use of distributed energy resource management systems for distributed energy resource load management
• Achieving distributed energy resource targets with non-wired alternatives or hosting capacity investments
• The value of bridge-to-wire solutions versus temporary budget increases for expedited capacity investments
• Secondary network investment strategies for high and heterogeneous distributed energy resource penetrations.

Future Development Plans

The CADET development team is exploring synergistic integrations between CADET and NREL's broad library of grid planning tools. Potential integration opportunities include:

Contact