Dear challenge participants,

Yesterday, at the close of the 6th GridFM Conference in Porto, we announced the results of the GridFM Challenge with GENCO, sponsored by GridFM.org, and invited the winning team to present their work live. Choosing a winner was a long and difficult process: the bar across your entries was remarkably high. In total, we received 36 submissions from all over the world, far exceeding our expectations!

The pace picked up dramatically as the deadline approached: 58% of all entries arrived in the final 24 hours, with my phone pinging almost every hour through the last night!

What struck us most was the breadth of topics you explored: from probing GENCO's internals and combining it with classical AC solvers, to contingency screening, renewable hosting capacity, differentiable inverse problems, and electricity markets.

Jury and reviewing process

Because of the volume of entries, we expanded the jury to seven members. After a first round of reviews to shortlist the top 5 finalists, the jury held a second round to deliberate and select the Grand Prize winner. This was not an easy task. A huge thank you to the jury for their time and thorough evaluations!

Runner-ups

Congratulations to our four runner-ups (listed in no particular order):

• A grid lab in your browser: GENCO on real Texas heat waves and hurricanes, every answer checked — Carmine Delle Femine et al. (@cardef , Vicomtech · UPV/EHU)
• Let GENCO predict the change, not the state: contingency screening with the anchored change start and one Newton step — Kehan Liu (@kehanliu , Independent)
• Transformer tap position identification with GENCO under fuzzy measurements — Weijie Xia (@Weijie1996 , TU Delft)
• GeoGridLens: screening where solar can connect, with GENCO over real geodata — Khuzaima Aziz (@Khuzaima , Polisense AI)

Winner

Congratulations to Ander Martinez Alonso, Evgenii Genov, and Rémy Cleenwerck (@andermart , Vrije Universiteit Brussel · Ghent University · DTU), winners of the Grand Prize (USD 1000, awarded by GridFM.org) for GENCO meets the neutral wire: four-wire dynamic operating envelopes for low-voltage grids!

Thank you again to everyone who built, tested, and openly shared their work with the community! Every single entry is available to explore in the Community tab.

Lastly, we want to take a moment to thank you personally. We truly believe that your submissions are among the most valuable contributions one can make to the GridFM community, to GridFM.org, and to OpenGridFM. You showed others what can be achieved with neural solvers and foundation models, and you helped open up entirely new research directions for the community. It will be amazing to see people getting inspired by your ideas and pushing them further. If you would like to chat more or contribute to OpenGridFM, don't hesitate to reach out to us at alban.puech2@ibm.com.

We are looking forward to seeing you at the next editions of the challenge and at one of our next GridFM conferences!

All the very best in your projects,

The GridFM Challenge Team