Power flow and optimization solved interactively in web browsers
Interactive Power Flow in the Browser
Human-Computer InteractionMathematical Software
Summary
Power system engineers usually need special software to analyze electrical grids, which can be hard to install and use. The authors created tellegen, a tool that runs entirely in a web browser, letting anyone easily upload power grid cases and interactively change settings to see the effects instantly. All data stays on the user's device, so sensitive information is safe. Their tests show this browser-based tool performs nearly as fast and accurately as traditional software.
What this means in practice
- •For power system engineers: Interactively explore and optimize power grid configurations directly in a web browser without installing software.
- •For utility operations teams: Quickly simulate impacts of demand or capacity changes on distribution or transmission grids using locally stored case data.
Authors
Samuel Talkington, Frederik Geth, Qian Zhang, Le Xie, Skyler Liu
Abstract
This paper introduces tellegen, an open source framework for interactive power flow (PF) and optimal power flow (OPF) studies that run in the browser. This provides intuitive and democratized access to power system analysis tools compiled to WebAssembly. A user can drag and drop a case file, click and drag to change a nodal demand or line rating, preview the impacts via sensitivity analysis, and obtain an exact re-solve on release. User case files and results stay entirely on the device: tellegen transmits zero Critical Energy/Electric Infrastructure Information (CEII). The framework comprises a core numerical engine for PF and OPF, reusable browser components, saved studies, and structured WebMCP tools for agentic interaction. We evaluate the transmission OPF solver by comparing objectives with PGLib baselines; the distribution PF solver by comparing voltages and currents with OpenDSS; and the WebAssembly execution times by comparing with PowerModels.jl. On realistic synthetic grids, WebAssembly OPF solves take only 25-43% longer than native binary solves. The implementation shows how an engineer can distribute an executable numerical study as a URL, reducing installation and hosting requirements while keeping case data local.