My favorite MATPOWER function is loadcase(caseName), so I made it work in Julia.

This package contains all transmission network data included in MATPOWER 5.1, plus data for the RTS-96 and RTS-79 networks. You can return a Dict containing network data using loadcase(caseName), just as you would with MATPOWER. No MATLAB kernel or MATPOWER installation is required.

To install:

Pkg.add("MatpowerCases")

To load data for, say, the IEEE 118-bus power flow test case:

using MatpowerCases
mpc = loadcase("case118")

You should see a one-line description of the network (unless you passed describe=false to loadcase()). Now mpc is a Dict containing network data in MATPOWER caseformat:

 CASE118    Power flow data for IEEE 118 bus test case.

Dict{ASCIIString,Any} with 8 entries:
  "baseMVA"   => 100.0
  "gen"       => [1.0 0.0 0.0 15.0 -5.0 0.955 100.0 1.0 100.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0…
  "branch"    => [1.0 2.0 0.0303 0.0999 0.0254 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0 -360.0 3…
  "docstring" => " CASE118    Power flow data for IEEE 118 bus test case.    …
  "bus_name"  => Any["Riversde  V2"…
  "bus"       => [1.0 2.0 51.0 27.0 0.0 0.0 1.0 0.955 10.67 138.0 1.0 1.06 0.94…
  "version"   => "2"
  "gencost"   => [2.0 0.0 0.0 3.0 0.01 40.0 0.0…

You may load data for any network MATPOWER 5.1 supports, plus the RTS-96 (case96) and RTS-79 (case79) networks.

The one-line description you see when you load a network is the first line of a docstring. Print the whole thing to see detailed network information:

print(mpc["docstring"])

This is the same docstring you would see if you ran help(caseName) in a MATLAB environment with MATPOWER installed.

MATPOWER is an awesome tool for power and energy researchers. It is actively developed by Ray Zimmerman, Carlos Murillo-Sánchez and others. If you use this package in your research, please cite them:

R. D. Zimmerman, C. E. Murillo-Sánchez, and R. J. Thomas, "MATPOWER: Steady-State Operations, Planning and Analysis Tools for Power Systems Research and Education," Power Systems, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 12-19, Feb. 2011.

Also, if you use any of the four recently-added European grid test networks (caseName ending in "pegase"), please cite this paper as follows:

Fliscounakis, S.; Panciatici, P.; Capitanescu, F.; Wehenkel, L., "Contingency Ranking With Respect to Overloads in Very Large Power Systems Taking Into Account Uncertainty, Preventive, and Corrective Actions," Power Systems, IEEE Transactions on , vol.28, no.4, pp.4909,4917, Nov. 2013 doi: 10.1109/TPWRS.2013.2251015

Note: The popular RTS-79 and RTS-96 networks are not included in MATPOWER, but are available in MatpowerCases thanks to Zhu Wang and Robert Green, who made their .m files freely available.