Planning has been studying stylized and peak cases, not the operating states that actually occur.

A planning case is a picture someone chose. The control room spends the year in a much wider set of conditions: different outages, different dispatch, different large loads. Those are the states that show up in operations, and most of them never become a study.

SAL is the record of that wider set. Every Sentinel cycle adds the real operating state and the results of the studies run on it. Planning finally sees the operating manifold — the states that actually occur — instead of only the cases a study assumed.

That record supports three jobs planning already has: