Autonomous agents for electricity-system planning

Abstract

Planning electricity systems requires repeated decisions that connect regional resources, investment, operation and network constraints. Here we present an autonomous planning framework that carries prepared regional scenarios through proposal, numerical evaluation, feedback interpretation, redesign and final plan selection. Agents propose investment bounds, storage operating conditions and feeder interventions, interpret numerical feedback, and decide how to revise designs and when to stop. The framework automatically executes annual investment-and-dispatch optimization and representative-feeder verification, applies fixed acceptance criteria and retains the lowest-cost accepted candidate. We evaluate forty carbon-constrained trajectories across ten system-year scenarios in five electricity systems and four countries, using two model deployments and single- and multi-agent architectures. All forty retain candidates satisfying the implemented physical and fixed annual operational carbon-budget checks. Twenty-eight of forty matched reference designs exceed the new scenario ceilings. A separate archive of ninety-six trajectories under a common 1,000 Mt annual ceiling provides matched references and broader regional coverage. The results demonstrate autonomous planning under explicit emissions constraints using public regional data and published institutional demand outlooks.