For more than two decades, PSR’s User Meeting has served as a forum for technical exchange among professionals engaged in energy planning, system operation, and analytical model development. Over time, however, its role has become broader than that of a conventional user event. As the sector has grown more complex, the meeting has increasingly become a place where methods, tools, and real-world planning challenges are examined together — not as separate conversations, but as different dimensions of the same transformation.
That transformation is now moving quickly. Power systems are being reshaped by the combined effects of decarbonization, electrification, climate uncertainty, network constraints, and rising needs for flexibility. At the same time, the analytical environment itself is changing. Advances in computing power, data pipelines, and artificial intelligence are beginning to influence not only the scale at which problems can be addressed, but also the way studies are formulated, workflows are organized, and decisions are supported. In parallel, the rapid expansion of data centers has become, in its own right, a relevant driver of electricity demand and infrastructure needs, bringing new planning questions to the forefront. In this context, the boundaries between methodology, computation, and sector strategy are becoming increasingly blurred.
The 2025 edition of the PSR User Meeting, held in Búzios, reflected this moment with particular clarity. Bringing together more than 100 participants from 19 countries and 48 companies, along with a large PSR technical delegation, the event offered an international setting for discussions on some of the issues that now define the frontier of energy analytics. Questions related to renewable integration, climate representation, flexibility, transmission expansion, methodological robustness, and practical model application were not treated as isolated topics, but as parts of a broader effort to improve how complex systems are represented and how planning decisions are made under uncertainty. The value of the meeting lay precisely in that combination: methodological depth, practical exchange, and direct interaction between users and developers.
The next edition, to be held in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, from May 25 to 29, 2026, will continue this trajectory. The setting is particularly appropriate. Beyond its symbolic relevance, Foz do Iguaçu places the discussion close to one of the most emblematic pieces of energy infrastructure in the world: Itaipu. The planned technical visit adds a concrete dimension to the meeting, connecting analytical discussions with the scale, engineering, and operational reality of large power systems.
The 2026 edition is expected to address strategic themes such as resilience and flexibility in power systems, climate change modeling and uncertainty representation, integrated planning of generation, transmission and storage, market design and reliability, advanced optimization methods, and the growing need for scalable analytical workflows supported by high-performance computing, automation, and advanced visualization. Within that broader landscape, it is natural that artificial intelligence will also be part of the conversation, both as a new source of demand through data-center expansion and as an emerging capability that may reshape how studies are prepared, explored, and used by practitioners and decision-makers. Not as a standalone trend, but as one more expression of how quickly the analytical and operational context of the energy sector is evolving.
This is what gives the PSR User Meeting its continued relevance. The event is not important simply because it presents new tools or recent developments, but because it creates a space in which the most pressing technical questions can be discussed before they become settled practice. It is a place to examine what should be represented more carefully, what can now be solved more effectively, what new trade-offs are emerging, and how analytical approaches must adapt to remain useful in a changing sector.
The Special Issue of this new Analytics Report is therefore a natural place to open the discussion. Many of the topics explored in the pages that follow — from uncertainty representation and storage valuation to transmission flexibility, computational scalability, and research-driven innovation — are closely connected to the same questions that will shape the next PSR User Meeting. We hope to continue that exchange in Foz do Iguaçu, in the company of those working to advance energy analytics in practice.
