Building trust in tomorrow’s system adequacy: How PlanOS empowers confident ISP
May Johnson-Leone
May 14, 2025
10-minute read
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Enable the planning of tomorrow’s complex and evolving grid—today
GE Vernova helps enhance system adequacy and your approach to Integrated System Planning
In our last blog, Integrated Systems Planning and why it matters, we discussed the power system’s increasing complexity and evolving needs, which demand a modernized approach to long-term grid planning. Integrated Systems Planning (ISP) offers a holistic approach that considers all aspects of an energy system, including load, generation, and system constraints, helping to ensure reliability and improving the system for cost-effectiveness and sustainability. You can comprehensively understand a power system by coordinating these elements rather than relying on historically siloed planning methods.
Pressures on the grid are expected to continue to intensify and accelerate. ISP provides the framework to adapt, whether managing renewables, addressing energy flexibility, or mitigating frequency response risks, but where do you start?
PlanOS: The integrated long-term transmission grid planning platform
PlanOS from GE Vernova’s Consulting Services is a grid software platform developed for ISP, allowing unified dataset models to flow seamlessly between GE Vernova’s native modular applications. With PlanOS, customers are able to run multi-functional analyses for economic planning, reliability assessments, and power flow all from one platform—helping to enable a holistic and seamless view of a given power system to make confident planning decisions.
The PlanOS platform brings together GE Vernova’s decades of proven planning software tools (Production Cost, formerly MAPS*; Resource Adequacy, formerly MARS*; Power Flow, formerly PSLF*) and newly added Capacity Expansion into one powerful interface.
PlanOS utilizes one shared dataset to seamlessly transition between analyses, like production cost, resource adequacy, and power flow, without the need for third-party add-ons. This results in quicker simulations without the need to modify the model (unless intended). Planners today must solve for multiple and sometimes competing constraints, making running each analysis with varied and discrete datasets challenging.
Ultimately, this approach allows experts across your company to spend less time coordinating data transfers and error checking and more time on analytics. This coordinated and holistic approach to analyzing a power system helps you break down traditional grid modeling silos and helps you with your Integrated System Planning analysis.
Power Flow (formerly PSLF)
Power Flow helps you more accurately describe and simulate the behavior of the grid and connected equipment under stable operating conditions. Additionally, you can identify potential vulnerabilities and help ensure reliable operation. With this function, your team can execute transmission planning, interconnection, and contingency and transfer analyses within the Power Flow function of PlanOS, with no third-party software required. Allowing you to create monitored and contingent element lists, including custom contingencies.
- Contingency analysis: A vital process in power systems engineering that evaluates the impact of potential failures or unexpected events on the power grid. By simulating various hypothetical scenarios, like the sudden loss of a transmission line or generation unit, this analysis helps ensure the stability and reliability of the power system under different conditions. Contingency analysis is natively integrated into the Power Flow function of PlanOS.
- Transfer capability analysis: This crucial process evaluates the highest amount of electrical power that can be transferred over the transmission network from one area to another without violating system limits under steady-state conditions. By assessing the transfer limits, this analysis helps ensure the safe and reliable operation of the power grid.
Resource Adequacy (formerly MARS)
Based on full sequential Monte Carlo simulations, Resource Adequacy enables you to assess whether the system has enough resources to help meet demand. By simulating the grid hour-by-hour, Resource Adequacy gives you a detailed look at how well the system can handle variations in demand, planned maintenance, and unexpected outages.
Resource Adequacy helps you run potential scenarios and power assessments, like NERC PROB-A, to evaluate generation reliability and reduce risks. It also enables you to model renewable energy sources while preserving the correlation to load demand and calculating equivalent load-carrying capacity to improve resource adequacy planning. Like the Power Flow function, Resource Adequacy has built-in contingency and transfer analyses capabilities. Contingency analysis and transfer analysis provide the technical basis for assessing the reliability and adequacy of the power system.
- Contingency analysis: A critical process identifying potential capacity shortfalls from outages that could affect resource adequacy.
- Transfer analysis: Helps to ensure adequate capacity in the transmission system to transfer power as needed, analyzing power flow between major load areas of your system and contingencies.
Production Cost (formerly MAPS)
The economics of your power system play an essential role in the day-to-day operation of your plant. Production Cost modeling from GE Vernova helps you analyze generation systems and transmission operations while helping to maintain costs. The Production Cost modeling function of PlanOS helps you to meet your business needs by simulating chronological load to more accurately model path-dependent quantities like run-time and storage. It can also help you determine transmission bottlenecks that might affect the economic operation of your system, giving you a more complete view of how generation systems and transmission operations interact.
Capacity Expansion (new offering)
The energy industry is evolving fast, making planning more complex than ever. The Capacity Expansion function of GE Vernova’s PlanOS helps forecast capacity additions while considering uncertain variables, allowing you to make wiser, more cost-effective investment decisions.
Aiming to meet global decarbonization** policies more efficiently and reliably requires tools capable of forecasting capacity additions. Current challenges in the energy sector and industry create a wide range of possible futures. Capacity Expansion gives you a stochastic approach to planning for this uncertainty. While prioritizing interoperability, Capacity Expansion is engineered to work across the Power Flow, Resource Adequacy, and Production Cost functions within PlanOS.
Why PlanOS?
On top of simplifying your IT infrastructure and breaking down planning silos within your organization, PlanOS provides the tools you need to conduct a holistic data-driven analysis of your power generation system, enabling ISP and giving you access to GE Vernova’s Consulting Services. With decades of experience in the industrial power industry, GE Vernova’s experts specialize in global grid data modeling, grid stability studies, integration studies, in-house testing, and advanced technologies that help ensure we can support customers every step of the way.
What sets us apart
At GE Vernova Consulting Services, power systems and grid modeling are our specialties. For more than a century, we have helped enable reliable, economical, and sustainable energy systems that power the world, and we take pride in our position as one of the industry leaders.
Make us an extension of your team to gain access to:
- Commercially available high-fidelity models of more than 50 countries across the globe.
- GE Vernova’s industrial backbone: When you are ready to execute and improve, we have the hardware, services, and software to electrify, build, and operate your grid.
- In-house expertise available to scale your team and accelerate your planning.
- Experts in every region.
All our expert studies and assessments are powered by the same software we offer our customers and backed by our educational training offerings.
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*Trademark of GE Vernova and/or its affiliates.
**Decarbonization, as used in this document, is intended to mean the reduction of carbon emissions on a kilogram per megawatt hour.
May Johnson-Leone
Software Commercial Operations & Americas GM, Consulting Services at GE Vernova
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