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Director of Generation

Outage planning and scheduling

Enhances◐ 1–3 years

What You Do Today

Coordinate planned outage windows with transmission, fuel supply, and market operations. Balance maintenance needs against capacity reserve margins and seasonal demand forecasts.

AI That Applies

AI models optimal outage windows by simulating capacity adequacy, market price scenarios, weather-driven demand, and supply chain lead times for major components.

Technologies

How It Works

The system reads the current state — resource availability, demand patterns, and constraints — to inform its scheduling logic. The processing layer applies the appropriate analytical models to the structured data, generating scored outputs that surface the most actionable insights. The output is a recommended plan or schedule that accounts for the identified constraints and optimization criteria.

What Changes

Spreadsheet-based outage calendars evolve into dynamic scheduling that reoptimizes as conditions change.

What Stays

Negotiating outage timing with RTOs/ISOs, union labor availability, and regulatory hold points that require human coordination.

What To Do Next

This section won't tell you what your numbers should be. It will show you how to find them yourself. Every instruction below produces a real, verifiable result in your organization. No benchmarks, no projections — just the steps to build your own evidence.

1

Establish Your Baseline

Know where you are before you move

Before adopting AI tools for outage planning and scheduling, understand your current state.

Map your current process: Document how outage planning and scheduling works today — who does what, how long it takes, where the bottlenecks are. You need this baseline to measure improvement.
Identify the judgment points: Negotiating outage timing with RTOs/ISOs, union labor availability, and regulatory hold points that require human coordination. These are the boundaries AI won't cross.
Assess your data readiness: AI tools for this area need data to work. Check whether your organization has the historical data, integrations, and data quality to support Prometheus tools.

Without a baseline, you can't measure whether AI actually improved anything. You'll adopt tools without knowing if they're working.

2

Define Your Measures

What to track and how to calculate it

Time per cycle

How to calculate

Measure how long outage planning and scheduling takes end-to-end today, then after AI adoption.

Why it matters

The most visible improvement is speed. If AI doesn't save time, question whether it's adding value.

Quality of output

How to calculate

Track error rates, rework frequency, or stakeholder satisfaction scores before and after.

Why it matters

Speed without quality is just faster mistakes. Measure both.

When to check: Check after 30 days of consistent use, then quarterly.
The commitment: Give new tools at least 30 days before judging. The first week is always awkward.
What NOT to measure: Don't measure AI adoption rate as a KPI. Adoption follows value — if the tool helps, people use it.
3

Start These Conversations

Who to talk to and what to ask

your VP Operations or COO

What's the current accuracy of our forecasting, and how would we know if an AI model is actually better?

They're prioritizing which operational processes to automate

your process improvement or lean lead

Which historical data do we have that's clean enough to train a prediction model on?

They understand the workflow dependencies that AI tools need to respect

4

Check Your Prerequisites

Confirm readiness before you invest

Check items as you confirm them.