The GridFM Challenge with GENCO

A real power-system challenge you tackle with GENCO – the latest architecture for GridFM. The challenge is revealed on October 2nd, 2026, which gives you three weeks to build your best solution and to win the award. Enter as an individual or a team, put GENCO to work, and compete for the US$1,000 grand prize.

Get ready

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.

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.
• 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

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.

GENCO and OpenGridFM

GENCO is a grid foundation model. Two open-source OpenGridFM libraries support the workflow from power-system data generation to model training and use:

• GENCO — the grid foundation model at the heart of the challenge. OpenGridFM on Hugging Face
• gridfm-graphkit — tools to train, fine-tune, and interact with grid foundation models. GitHub repository
• gridfm-datakit — tools to generate scalable, realistic training data. GitHub repository

Schedule

All times are Western European Time (WET), Porto local time.

Date / time	Activity
2 Oct	Challenge released The problem and rules are published, and the challenge opens to all participants.
25 Oct	Submission deadline Entries close at end of day, anywhere on Earth (AoE).
30 Oct 17:15	Ranking & winners announced The full ranking is revealed and the US$1,000 grand prize is awarded live in Porto.

Get ready

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

Category	Resource	Link
Tutorial	Colab tutorial: optimal power flow with GENCO A hands-on starting point, runnable in the browser.	Open in Colab
GENCO	GENCO — the grid foundation model behind the challenge	Paper
	Pre-trained models and datasets	OpenGridFM on Hugging Face
OpenGridFM toolkit	gridfm-graphkit — train, fine-tune, and interact with grid foundation models	GitHub
	gridfm-datakit — generate power-flow and optimal-power-flow training data	GitHub · Paper
	All open-source libraries	OpenGridFM on GitHub

GENCO Challenge @ GridFM Porto 2026 · Challenge 2–25 October · Winners announced 30 October