The GENCO Challenge — GridFM Porto 2026

What it is

GENCO is a foundation model for the electric grid. This is an open challenge — no leaderboard, no single right answer. You decide how to use GENCO and where to take it, then share your work with the community. A jury drawn from across the GridFM.org selects the winners.

Submissions might, for example, apply GENCO to a real power-system task in a new or more effective way; build a novel workflow or tool around it; probe how GENCO works internally, or extend and improve the model; or combine GENCO with the OpenGridFM toolkits to do something that was hard before. Whatever direction you take, your work should center on GENCO and make use of the OpenGridFM toolkits.

The GENCO Challenge is part of the 6th Conference on Foundation Models of the Electric Grid, Porto, 29–30 October 2026.

What we're looking for

Submissions are judged across five dimensions:

Originality & impact — genuinely new or game-changing ways and workflows of using GENCO.

Technical quality — sound methodology, thoughtful experiments, and clear visuals.

Exploration & extension of GENCO — insight into how GENCO works, and/or improvements to the model and its capabilities.

Communication & narrative — a convincing story told with clear, compelling visuals.

Open science & reproducibility — shared code, models, and data so others can build on your work.

Ideas to explore

Start from our example

We've posted an example entry: an application of GENCO for Contingency Analysis at speed. Use it as a template for the kind of work — and the write-up — we're looking for.

Not sure where to take it? A few directions to spark ideas — you are free to go well beyond these:

Hybrid solvers — combine GENCO with classical solvers for speed without losing accuracy.
Explore GENCO's embedding space — probe what the model has learned and how it represents system states.
GENCO in a complex workflow — plug it into a multi-step pipeline such as security-constrained OPF (SC-OPF).
Build a UI — an interface to analyze and visualize GENCO results from the perspective of a grid operator or planner.
Improve the performance of GENCO — benchmark your accuracy and runtime improvements across several datasets.

How to enter

Submit through the Community tab of this Space. Open a new discussion for your entry and include:

A title for your submission.
A short write-up describing your idea, method, and results.
Visuals — figures, plots, or images that show what you did.
Links to your code, models, and data (for example, a code archive or a Hugging Face model or dataset).
A contact email, plus the names of all team members and their affiliations, where applicable.

Selection

You may enter as an individual or a team. There is no online pitch or Q&A — the jury evaluates entries solely on what is posted to the Community tab, so make your submission clear and self-contained.

Key dates

2 October 2026	Challenge opens
25 October 2026	Submission deadline — end of day, anywhere on Earth (AoE)
30 October 2026, 17:15 WET (Porto local time)	Winners announced live in Porto, at the close of the conference

Prize: US$1,000 grand prize sponsored by GridFM.org.

Eligibility

Open to everyone — student or not, anywhere in the world.
Submissions must use the GENCO model and the OpenGridFM toolkits.
Entries must be posted to this Space's Community tab before the deadline.

Individuals affiliated with IBM are not eligible to compete.

Jury

Winners are selected by a jury drawn from across the GridFM.org.

Individual jury members to be announced.

Get ready

Explore GENCO and the OpenGridFM tooling, and use them throughout the challenge.

GENCO & the OpenGridFM toolkits

Foundation model

GENCO

The grid foundation model behind the challenge.

Paper · Hugging Face

Library

gridfm-graphkit

Train, fine-tune, and interact with grid foundation models.

PyPI

Library

gridfm-datakit

Generate power-flow and optimal-power-flow training data.

PyPI · Paper

Learn more about the project at GridFM.org.

Questions

Have a question? Open a discussion in the Community tab using the [Question] label followed by your question title — for example, [Question] How to deal with issue xyz. Questions are answered on a daily basis during the challenge.