System and method for providing a renewable energy network optimization tool

Embodiments of a system and method are disclosed for providing a renewable energy network optimization tool. A method for optimizing a renewable energy network determines an initial configuration state, populates a pool of candidate sites for placement of renewable-energy generating units a hybrid simulated annealing-genetic algorithm, constructs a plurality of candidate renewable energy generation networks from the pool of candidate sites using random selection, evaluates the candidate renewable energy generation networks using scoring metrics, ranks the evaluated candidate renewable energy generation networks with respect to each other and prior iteration candidate renewable energy generation networks, adds candidate sites from a top ranked candidate renewable energy generation network to a list of candidate sites to be kept repeats the above until a final best candidate renewable energy generation network of kept sites is determined.