PowerPlanner vs GridOp

Keep the lights on. PowerPlanner is a laid-back strategy builder where you grow a whole region's electricity network — one power plant, pylon and transformer at a time. Start with a single generator and a handful of homes. Wire them up across a blueprint-style map you can freely pan and zoom, then expand into factories, malls, data centers, hospitals and stadiums as demand — and your income — keeps climbing. BUILD A REAL GRID • Generators with character: diesel, solar (follows the day/night sun), wind (rides the changing weather), coal (and its CO₂ bill) and a full nuclear plant. • Connect everything with poles, transformers and batteries. Link range and transformer coverage actually matter — plan your layout. • Watch the power flow along your lines and keep every district supplied. RUN THE ECONOMY • A live commodity market for coal, oil, uranium, gas and propane with real-time price charts — buy low, sell high. • Dynamic building prices reward diversification over spamming one thing. • Manage fuel stocks, CO₂ costs and day/night demand swings. GO NUCLEAR • Cool reactors with water pumps and pipes, handle interim waste, and build shared waste repositories you can switch on and off. RESEARCH & UPGRADE • A 30+ node research tree: efficiency, income, grid range and building upgrades up to level 5. • Refineries turn crude oil into diesel, gas and propane to trade. PLAY YOUR WAY • Single-player, offline-friendly. No account required. • Cloud saves via Game Center keep your grid in sync across your devices. • Optimized for iPhone and iPad. Free to play with a banner ad. Don't like ads? A single one-time purchase removes them forever — no subscription, ever. A few friendly tip purchases and optional cosmetic skins let you support development — all completely optional. Build it. Wire it. Power it. Grow it.

GridOp is an idle strategy game that runs the real physics of a power grid. You run a U.S. regional grid: place transmission lines between power plants and cities, energize new customers, and keep the lights on as demand climbs. Under the hood, a genuine DC power-flow solver computes how electricity actually moves — congestion, overloads, and cascading blackouts are real consequences of how you built your grid, not scripted events. Every failure is one you can understand. Push a line past its limit and it trips; the power reroutes, and if a neighbor can't carry the load, the cascade begins. A plain-language panel tells you exactly what failed and why — so you learn the grid by running it. WHAT YOU DO • Build freely — place transmission lines across a stylized regional map • Energize cities, from a rural co-op to a data center, as your grid grows • Watch real load flow — line color and animated power tell you where the strain is • Trace every cascade back to a decision you made • Engineer redundancy so a single line failure never takes you down (N-1 thinking) • Weather heat waves, storms, and wildfires that threaten the grid • Prestige and rebuild smarter each cycle with what you've learned WHY IT'S DIFFERENT Most "grid" games fake it with +1 buttons. GridOp is honest: a real load-flow solver is the engine, so the grid behaves like the real thing. Whether you're an engineer, a student, or just grid-curious, it turns the invisible machine that powers modern life into something you can actually operate. No account. No ads. No in-app purchases. Play offline.