January 12th, 2021 — Across the country, policymakers are beginning to converge on an ambitious but necessary goal: powering the US electric grid with 100% clean energy by 2035. Such a transformation requires a significant expansion of both renewable generation and of the transmission and distribution (T&D) system that will incorporate these clean sources into the grid. According to the 2035 Report from the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, $100 billion of transmission investment is needed to reach 90% clean energy by 2035.
As renewable generation, battery storage, and electric vehicles have contributed to an increasingly dynamic and variable grid, grid modeling software has changed little over the past thirty years. Faced with this increasing complexity, grid planners and power system engineers are left to employ a variety of costly and time-intensive workarounds and brute-force number crunching to identify and mitigate grid reliability issues, including those that indicate investment in new infrastructure is required.
Pearl Street Technologies (PST) is enabling a more reliable, resilient, and sustainable power grid through advanced modeling, simulation, and optimization tools. PST’s software optimizes the placement and reliability analysis of renewables and energy storage while reducing engineering study time by as much as 200x. In the long term, PST is positioned to be the cloud platform for the power sector that unifies and manages the grid via joint transmission & distribution planning and real-time grid operation.
Bringing Grid Planning Software into the 21st Century
Today, technical limitations of legacy planning software have introduced fundamental barriers to conducting effective and holistic grid planning and operation studies. As a result, many utilities, ISOs, and project developers rely on a patchwork of platforms and support from boutique consulting firms.
Pearl Street Technologies is reinventing grid planning software from the ground up. PST applies robust and scalable methods similar to those used to design, simulate, and optimize multi-billion-node integrated circuits while remaining compatible with industry-standard models and data formats. This innovation enables PST’s software to solve the most complex grid planning scenarios and identify reliability issues that could lead to blackouts if left unchecked. Though their primary focus is on the transmission sector today, their software is equally applicable to distribution planning and integrated T&D planning for renewable energy deployment.
Powerhouse Ventures Invests in Pearl Street Technologies
First developed at Carnegie Mellon University, Pearl Street Technologies’ Suite of Unified Grid Analyses with Renewables (SUGAR) software reduces engineering study time and unifies a disjointed software landscape. In the long term, the solution is positioned to serve as the foundation of both long-term planning and real-time grid operations.
PST is addressing a $4B global annual market for T&D planning and real-time grid operations offerings. To date, the team has raised over $1.8M in non-dilutive funding from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and ARPA-e. PST is currently piloting SUGAR with Southern Company and a regional transmission operator.
Powerhouse Ventures invested in Pearl Street Technologies’ pre-seed round, following an investment from Incite (led by Nest Co-Founder & former CEO Matt Rogers). We’re thrilled to work with PST’s accomplished team, including Co-Founders David Bromberg, Hui Zheng, and Larry Pileggi, to build the transmission and distribution system for a zero-carbon grid.
Check out additional coverage by Jeff St. John in Greentech Media this morning.
Special thanks to Abe Baca, Alexandra Harbour, and Ry Storey-Fisher
To read more about Powerhouse Ventures’ other publicly-announced investments, visit our Insights page.