2027 Event Agenda

This session explores how utilities are leveraging automated solutions analysis to scale time-series distribution planning and help planners automatically identify, evaluate, and compare mitigation alternatives across thousands of planning conditions.

Distribution planning is becoming exponentially more complex. Electrification, DER adoption, load growth, operational flexibility, and increasing regulatory requirements are pushing utilities beyond traditional peak-based studies and toward time-series and scenario-based planning approaches.

While these methods provide a more accurate understanding of grid needs, they also require planners to evaluate thousands of hours of system performance across multiple future scenarios. Understanding not only whether a violation occurs, but also its magnitude, duration, frequency, and risk is becoming essential to selecting the right solution. As the number of scenarios increases, so does the number of potential mitigation strategies that must be evaluated.

The industry has made significant progress in automating the identification of system issues. The next challenge is automating the evaluation of solutions.

This session explores how utilities are responding to this challenge through automated solutions analysis. Attendees will hear from utilities at different stages of their journey, from organizations actively deploying automated mitigation capabilities within their planning process to those evaluating how automation can help address the growing complexity of time-series and scenario-based planning. Dominion Energy will share lessons learned from implementing automated mitigation analysis to support time-series distribution planning and accelerate solution development. Southern California Edison will discuss the growing complexity associated with electrification, DER integration, and scenario-based planning, and the planning capabilities utilities increasingly need to manage this complexity at scale.

By combining time-series power flow, scenario analysis, and optimization techniques, planners can automatically identify, evaluate, and compare mitigation alternatives across thousands of planning conditions. This allows engineers to spend less time running studies and manually evaluating options, and more time reviewing results, assessing risks, and making informed planning decisions.