The Anthropocene Institute is a non-governmental organization with the mission of utilizing science and technology to address the planet’s needs. It drives and facilitates innovation in clean energy to address the urgency of climate change. The Institute also supports start-ups and universities to develop emerging and disruptive energy technologies that are clean, safe and reliable.

The Anthropocene Institute is interested in the possibility of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) as a viable option for new sources of power generation in comparison to coal and gas plants that have significantly worse emissions that affect the atmosphere.

SMRs, however, must be placed properly in power substations based on power generation, power outage occurrence rates, and power consumption demands. Traditionally this would be done entirely by hand, which is time-consuming, error prone, and makes it hard to quickly compare multiple placements.

Our Electricity Grid Planning Tool is a web dashboard that uses machine learning to automatically simulate SMR power generation and SMR placement. Our tool uses historical energy consumption data to accurately predict the costs and benefits of placing an SMR at a particular power substation.

Our web application provides an easy-to-use interface used by electricity grid planners seeking to better understand the cost and benefits for deploying SMRs. Users simply view specific substations, and our application provides them with statistics and recommendations relating to the cost-benefits analysis of deploying a SMR in that area. Users can also easily compare two locations to make an informed decision without wasting time with manual calculations.

The machine learning models were developed in Python with scikit-learn. The user interface is built on JavaScript, CSS and HTML with an Apache web server and Google Maps API.