I worked for about 8 months on an internal product for doing transmission studies at a large utility company. Basically, it would feed a PSS/E [1] file specifying most of the transmission grid into a power flow simulation software called TARA [2]. We would add a few extra elements to the grid to simulate a wind or solar plant. TARA would spit out all the components that would be overloaded, with or without contingencies. We would read the results and estimate the transmission costs.
Essentially, we were replicating the process that the ISOs used internally. The users of this product were all former ISO employees. The goal was to speed up the process of determining whether transmission costs were going to ruin a project before any money was spent. ISOs take months to do their analysis. The users told me that they were usually looking for $0 transmission upgrades on $50m+ projects.
The grid and contingency files from the ISOs were under confidentiality agreements. This rubbed me the wrong way from a competition point of view. We also had data about projects slated to be built which could take away capacity from our projects.
I could see a SaaS in doing this sort of analysis. It's probably bureaucratic between reselling TARA, NDAs, and maybe legal issues if the analysis was wrong. I have doubts about the market, most of the money is in big projects at big companies that are already doing this sort of thing.
[1] https://www.siemens.com/global/en/products/energy/grid-softw...
[2] https://power-gem.co/software/tara-software/
Essentially, we were replicating the process that the ISOs used internally. The users of this product were all former ISO employees. The goal was to speed up the process of determining whether transmission costs were going to ruin a project before any money was spent. ISOs take months to do their analysis. The users told me that they were usually looking for $0 transmission upgrades on $50m+ projects.
The grid and contingency files from the ISOs were under confidentiality agreements. This rubbed me the wrong way from a competition point of view. We also had data about projects slated to be built which could take away capacity from our projects.
I could see a SaaS in doing this sort of analysis. It's probably bureaucratic between reselling TARA, NDAs, and maybe legal issues if the analysis was wrong. I have doubts about the market, most of the money is in big projects at big companies that are already doing this sort of thing.
[1] https://www.siemens.com/global/en/products/energy/grid-softw...
[2] https://power-gem.co/software/tara-software/