Description of need
Right now, power utilities like National Grid have a forecasting team that can easily generate thousands of scenarios for demand and supply. But the work of planning the network for any given scenario is very labor (and expertise) intensive, so the typical utility has no ability to model uncertainty.
What if we could plan for thousands of scenarios instead of just a handful? This would require much faster and more automated planning and studies for each scenario.
Quinn Nakayama says:
PG&E uses Eaton’s application (SIGN) and LoadSeal. These tools “fucking suck” at scenario analysis, looking at multiple variables, etc. There’s a painful amount of manual massaging required to take CYME output and get to cost-effective projects. It’s shocking that Eaton isn’t doing any of this. You would expect Eaton to be the perfect entity to do this, but since they aren’t, there may be an opportunity to compete with them.
Problem severity (1-10)
8
Who has this need
Distribution utilities
Total addressable market (TAM)
Solutions today, and their shortcomings
- Rhizome Data
- https://www.gridsight.ai/
- Vision by Blunomy
Potentially relevant capabilities
- Steve Caldwell was very interested in the synthetic network software from Comillas Universidad Pontificia that generates optimized networks and could enable integrated energy planning and non-wires alternatives. Ideally it could make recommendations that into account power, natural gas, and hydrogen (e.g. “electrify this town, but don’t bother to electrify this other town, instead deploy hydrogen infrastructure there”) See Reference Network Model
- Distribution grid planning software suite for electric utilities