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Transmission Planner

Updating the long-range transmission expansion plan

Enhances◐ 1–3 years

What You Do Today

Develop 10-20 year system expansion plans that account for load growth, generator retirements, new resource additions, and policy mandates. Billions of dollars of capital investment decisions depend on these plans.

AI That Applies

ML ranks transmission expansion candidates by benefit-cost ratio across hundreds of load, resource, and policy scenarios, identifying investments that perform well under uncertainty.

Technologies

How It Works

For updating the long-range transmission expansion plan, the system draws on the relevant operational data and applies the appropriate analytical models. The automation engine executes each step in the process sequence — validating inputs, applying business rules, generating outputs, and routing exceptions to human review queues. The output is a recommended plan or schedule that accounts for the identified constraints and optimization criteria.

What Changes

Plan development evaluates orders of magnitude more scenarios. Capital allocation becomes robust to uncertainty instead of being driven by a few hand-picked futures.

What Stays

Stakeholder engagement, policy judgment, and the political reality of siting new transmission. The best plan is useless if you cannot build it.

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 updating the long-range transmission expansion plan, understand your current state.

Map your current process: Document how updating the long-range transmission expansion plan works today — who does what, how long it takes, where the bottlenecks are. You need this baseline to measure improvement.
Identify the judgment points: Stakeholder engagement, policy judgment, and the political reality of siting new transmission. 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 Scenario planning tools 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 updating the long-range transmission expansion plan 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.