diff --git a/.gitignore b/.gitignore
index 659bc61d0..a0181d7b0 100644
--- a/.gitignore
+++ b/.gitignore
@@ -30,3 +30,8 @@ pandapower/timeseries/logs/*
 pandapower/test/opf/buffer_file.json
 pandapower/test/buffer_file.json
 /pandapower/test/test_files/postgresql_connect_data.json
+.env
+.venv
+env/
+env*/
+venv/
diff --git a/pyproject.toml b/pyproject.toml
index 77234e152..cddf1a093 100644
--- a/pyproject.toml
+++ b/pyproject.toml
@@ -67,6 +67,7 @@ fileio = ["xlsxwriter", "openpyxl", "cryptography", "geopandas", "psycopg2"]
 converter = ["matpowercaseframes"]
 pgm = ["power-grid-model-io"]
 control = ["shapely"]
+pm = ["julia"]
 all = [
     "numpydoc", "sphinx", "sphinx_rtd_theme", "sphinx-pyproject",
     "plotly>=3.1.1", "matplotlib", "igraph", "geopandas>=1.0",
@@ -74,7 +75,8 @@ all = [
     "ortools", "numba>=0.25", "lightsim2grid==0.9.0",
     "xlsxwriter", "openpyxl", "cryptography", "psycopg2",
     "matpowercaseframes",
-    "power-grid-model-io"
+    "power-grid-model-io",
+    "julia"
 ]
 # "shapely", "pyproj", "Pyogrio" are dependencies of geopandas and should be already available ("Fiona" got dropped)
 # "hashlib", "zlib", "base64" produce install problems, so they are not included