A method, system and program product implementing storage of a (power or ground) mesh plane file using a multiple line shape, possibly with the storage of lines also, to reduce file size. In addition, the invention implements an activate-substantial-portion-and-remove technique to generate mesh planes rather than the conventional additive approach, which improves the speed of designing the IC carriers. A resulting mesh plane design file may be as much as half the size of a file generated using the conventional line-by-line and storage approaches.