What the Planners Behind the Grid Told Us in 2025

This past year, Nira set out to expand our solutions to serve every grid stakeholder in the transmission planning landscape, as shared in a Latitude Media feature back in May. We entered the year with a clear intention: to take what we had learned from supporting more than 100 of the country’s largest solar, wind, storage, and data center developers, and bring that expertise to the transmission teams who keep the grid reliable.

Since our announcement, we have spoken with every ISO, and met with dozens of utilities giving us a nationwide view into how planning is evolving and where the system is feeling the most strain.

What we heard across regions was remarkably consistent:

Planning workloads are rising faster than the systems built to support them, and the work behind each study is becoming more complex.

Planners described faster model refresh cycles, expanding scenario requirements, heavier cross-team coordination, and more frequent restudies triggered by shifting assumptions. And all of it is landing on teams whose staffing levels have barely changed. Our CEO, Chris Ariante, shared these findings in a recent article with Utility Dive.

In this edition of Grid Horizons, we break down several specific study workflows where automation delivered the most significant time and resource savings across ISOs and utilities. The results aren’t theoretical, they’re grounded in the numbers we observed across hundreds of planning processes this year.

1. Interconnection & Reliability Studies

Problem:

Setting up base cases, running studies, identifying upgrades, and allocating costs is consistently one of the most time-intensive and error-prone steps in interconnection and reliability analysis. Across regions, planners told us this is where model updates create overwhelming amounts of rework, and where automation provided immediate time savings.

Solution:

Where automation made the difference was not in changing engineering judgment, but in handling the repetitive setup and cross-team coordination. Nira’s software supported standardizing case prep, enabling consistent reruns, performing automated validation, automating constraint identification, determining network upgrades, estimating costs, and allocating those costs based on ISO methodologies. This allowed teams to complete studies dramatically faster while reducing the burden of rework and ensuring results stayed aligned with evolving ISO assumptions.

Key Results:

• >90% faster study turnaround

• >50% reduction in resource needs

• Billions in potential cost discrepancies identified early

  
  

2. Long-Term Planning Scenarios

Problem:

Across ISOs and utilities, long-term planning has become a scenario-driven process. Planners are expected to evaluate futures shaped by data center load growth, electrification, accelerated retirements, policy-driven resource mixes, and extreme-weather sensitivities. Each scenario requires new assumptions, refreshed models, and full validation as well as assessment across multiple planning years, load conditions and geographic areas. The result is a large expansion in total study conditions, limiting how many futures planners are able to meaningfully test.

Solution:

Nira’s software automates multi-scenario studies, enabling ISOs to test more possibilities with accuracy and speed. By standardizing assumptions and streamlining model setup, planners were able to explore far more futures in less time and build a more complete picture of system needs under uncertainty. This includes running planning studies, identifying system needs, developing alternative solutions, and determining and selecting the best overall alternatives.

Key Results:

• 10× increase in scenarios planners could evaluate

• Repeatable, auditable logic across studies

  
  

3. Base-Case Development

Problem:

One recurring challenge for many utilities is developing base cases, the models that underpin all reliability planning studies. Engineers start with a current system model, then apply updated load forecasts, generation additions, and transmission-topology changes, often merging hundreds of files and manually resolving conflicts to create a final, solvable case.

The frequency of rebuilding these models has increased nearly 10×, driven by rapid generation turnover, load growth, and policy change. Many utilities now rebuild cases several times a quarter, relying on custom scripts and one-off processes that are difficult to maintain and scale.

Solution:

Automating and standardizing base-case development allowed planning teams to rebuild cases quickly and consistently, reducing manual effort, ensuring a clear audit history, and creating a stable foundation for downstream studies.

Key Results:

• >80% faster base-case generation

• >50% reduction in resource needs

  
  

Planning Ahead for 2026

As we look ahead to 2026, one theme is clear: transmission planning is entering a new era of scale. Study volumes will continue to rise, model cycles will tighten, and the number of futures worth evaluating will only grow. The planners we spoke with this year shared that the grid is becoming more dynamic, and the processes behind it must evolve just as quickly.

Our goal going forward is simple: to give the teams behind the grid the transparency, speed, and repeatability they need to plan with confidence. We’re grateful to the ISOs, utilities, and developers who shared their time and insights with us this year. Your expertise continues to shape our roadmap and the tools we build.

Here’s to a year ahead where planners have more leverage, more clarity, and more capacity to meet the growing demands on the grid.