🎯 Objective

You are the Transmission Planner for a Regional Transmission Organization (RTO). Your job is to build a generation & transmission portfolio that delivers effective MW to the city at least equal to the demand target shown in the scorecard (legacy grid delivery plus a 5-year forecast gap) while staying within environmental and budget limits. When you submit your plan, the State Utility Commission (standing in for FERC) reviews it against four customer pillars.

🗺️ The Grid — Terrain & Land Costs

Every tile has a terrain type that affects land acquisition cost, construction cost, and permitting complexity. This mirrors the detailed cost studies required under FERC’s pro forma LGIP.

⚠️ Tiles in Columns 12–15 (urban fringe) carry an additional siting surcharge ($5M–$20M) and community impact penalty — reflecting the higher land values and opposition that generation projects face in suburban corridors near cities.

⚡ Generators & Interconnection Service

Each generator type has a Capacity Factor (CF) — the fraction of nameplate capacity actually delivered on average. This is the core input to FERC’s Deliverability test.

📋 ERIS vs. NRIS — The Interconnection Service Choice

When you place a generator, you choose its interconnection service type. This is drawn directly from FERC’s pro forma Large Generator Interconnection Procedures (LGIP):

🔌 Transmission Lines

Select the Line tool and click & drag to route transmission from a generator to the City. Only generators connected to the City via a continuous line path contribute MW to your score.

• Base cost: $5M per segment + terrain land cost adder.
• Mountain/Wetland segments cost significantly more — reflecting right-of-way acquisition, environmental permits, and civil construction on difficult terrain.
• Residential routing: Lines through house tiles incur a community impact deduction (−3 pts per segment) on top of doubled land cost. This mirrors the public opposition and Section 106 historic-property consultation required when lines cross residential areas.
• Proximity multiplier: Lines through the near-city corridor (cols 6–15) cost more — reflecting the premium for urban ROW.

💡 Strategy tip: Route north or south around mountains via the open bypass corridors. Wetlands are expensive but passable. The cheapest path is rarely the most direct one — just like real transmission planning.

📊 Scoring Pillars (Customer Happiness)

Your final grade is a weighted average of four pillars, reflecting the multi-objective balancing act every Transmission Planner faces:

Portfolio Expansion mechanics

Delivered MW is computed with a max-flow model: each line segment has a static thermal limit (230 kV style). Multiple parallel paths can share flow toward the load. If injections exceed what the network can carry, you see congestion (curtailment).

Order 881 (simplified): ratings are fixed in-game (no ambient-adjusted derates). Real-world lines sag in heat; this teaches the same limit idea without seasonal math.

CAPEX vs OPEX: utility-owned plants add to rate base and shareholder return; PPAs avoid CapEx and help customer bills but add resource-adequacy risk in the reliability score.

Order 2023 (cluster studies): placing many solar farms triggers a one-time cluster study fee for shared network upgrades.

Coal retirement: erasing a legacy coal plant with the Erase tool does not apply the withdrawal penalty and flags surplus interconnection at that site (cheaper solar).

🛡️ N-1 Contingency Analysis

At submission, the game runs a NERC TPL-001 style N-1 analysis: it simulates losing each individual transmission line segment one at a time and checks whether the remaining grid can still deliver enough MW (about 93% of city demand) after each outage, using the same max-flow rules as normal operation.

• If your grid survives all single-line outages → full +25 reliability bonus.
• Partial survival (e.g., 6 of 8 outages survived) gives proportional credit.
• A single radial line with no redundancy fails every N-1 test.

In real planning, ISOs must show that no single contingency causes load shedding exceeding defined thresholds — this is the fundamental reason transmission systems are built with meshed topology rather than radial spurs.

💡 Strategy tip: Build at least two independent transmission paths to the city (redundant feed points) to earn the ★ Redundant bonus on top of your N-1 score.

🏗️ Substations

Substations are key nodes in the transmission network where voltage is stepped up or down, and where multiple lines converge. In the game there are two types:

💡 Strategy tip: Place a substation in the middle of a long mountain or wetland crossing to cut routing costs by up to 50%. A single substation can pay for itself after just 2–3 line segments.

In real FERC proceedings, a generator’s Interconnection Facilities Study identifies which existing substations can accept new load. If no existing substation is nearby, the interconnection customer must fund a new switching station — typically $50M–$150M depending on voltage class.

⚠️ Queue Withdrawal Penalty

Demolishing a generator with the Erase tool triggers a 20% withdrawal penalty on the sunk costs already paid for that asset (base CapEx + land cost + any NRIS surcharge + eminent domain).

• The penalty amount is added permanently to your Total CapEx — you cannot get it back.
• You still lose the generator’s MW contribution, but pay the penalty on top of already-spent capital.
• Example: A $100M natural gas plant on a $25M mountain tile with NRIS (+$35M) = $160M sunk. Demolishing it costs an extra $32M withdrawal penalty.

💡 Strategy tip: Plan your generator siting carefully before committing — expensive terrain choices compounded by the withdrawal penalty can severely harm your Affordability score.

📋 Utility RFP Cards

At the start of each game, the State Utility Commission issues two Request for Proposals (RFPs) — drawn randomly from a pool of seven procurement mandates. These are displayed in the Active RFPs sidebar panel throughout the game.

When your plan is approved, any RFP conditions you’ve met earn bonus points applied on top of your four-pillar Customer Happiness score (capped at 100%):

RFP bonuses are displayed in the result modal after plan submission. If your plan is hard-rejected (MW below demand or GHG over cap), RFP bonuses are shown as missed — the plan must be approved first.