The power grid is hard to understand. This startup is trying to help.

When Max Kanter bought an electric vehicle back in 2022, he didn’t expect it to be so hard to find accurate data on the cost and carbon-intensity of the electricity surging through the power grid.

As not only a new EV owner but also a data whiz, he sought out the information because he ​“wanted to build a machine learning algorithm to check energy prices and charge and discharge profitably,” Kanter told Canary Media. ​“But when I got a peek behind the curtain, I saw the data and tools the industry had could be a lot better.”

That’s why Kanter — who has previously built and sold an analytics startup — co-founded Grid Status, a data platform that aims to make high-quality, real-time grid information widely accessible.

The platform, launched last year, grew out of Kanter’s early efforts to pull together real-time grid data, the results of which he posted to the open-source software development platform GitHub so that ​“anyone could download our data for free and start using it,” he said. The GitHub post gained traction among some in the energy industry — and helped Kanter meet his eventual Grid Status co-founders, longtime energy industry players Connor Waldoch and Andrew Gelston.

Since starting Grid Status, Kanter and the rest of his seven-member team have seen demand for their combination of free data and subscription services increase to about 10,000 users per month. Those users include most of the country’s interstate grid operators and largest energy project developers, as well as some well-known U.S. energy experts.

“We’ve taken the approach to democratizing access to data on the grid, and we’ve signed up people from all corners of the industry,” said Kanter, who serves as the company’s CEO.

On Wednesday, Grid Status announced an $8 million investment round led by Energize Capital, a venture firm backed by General Electric, Schneider Electric, and major energy developer Invenergy. Other investors include former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross of NFDG Ventures, and Rayburn Electric Cooperative, a member-owned utility in northeast Texas that’s using Grid Status’ data and algorithms in its grid control room.

Rayburn is one of the growing number of Grid Status customers that are paying the company to co-develop the products they need to track what’s happening on the grid, said Tyler Lancaster, a partner at Energize.

“Data centers, virtual power plants, consumer-electricity-oriented companies — there are hundreds of thousands of parties that need to understand the grid, and do so in a much more technology-forward manner,” he said. ​“If Grid Status can serve that vision, we’re talking about a much more valuable enterprise down the road.”

Other Grid Status users are tapping into the company’s free data resources, which include dashboards and graphing tools that allow users to track and analyze various grid metrics nationwide, from record-high renewables generation to pricing. The company’s data has been featured in reporting by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, and other publications — including Canary Media — and is a regular source of data for energy analysts’ social media posts.

“It’s in the public interest to have a tool like Grid Status that provides a valuable service — one place where you can go and get a consistent dashboard of what’s going on,” said Ric O’Connell, founding executive director of nonprofit analysis group GridLab, which provided financial support for some of Grid Status’s early-stage work. 

Why is grid data so hard to get and use? 

Kanter’s past work in general-purpose machine learning gave him access to lots of different kinds of data. ​“But one we never touched on was energy. I think that’s because it’s an esoteric domain, and having data, but not understanding how that data is used, isn’t very useful.”

O’Connell agreed that accessing and using the data available from grid operators and government agencies is ​“incredibly complicated. Right now you could go dig around on their web pages and find where they post these data. But it would take you a long time, and every place is a little bit different — different formats and different ways of representing it.”

Kanter cited the example of ERCOT, the grid operator for most of Texas. ​“If you dig deep enough on ERCOT’s site, there’s a place you can find — with some delay — what resources are being used” to generate power, he said. But that data comes in a zip file, which itself contains eight different files, and ​“you have to merge them all together,” he added. ​“Then, if you want to figure out what zone they are in, you have to merge them with another dataset — and if you want to know the prices, that’s another dataset.”

Grid operators like ERCOT and government agencies like the U.S. Energy Information Administration ​“do a very respectable job making a lot of this data available,” he noted, but it can be hard to navigate. Collecting, validating, merging, and regularly updating these various datasets makes the information much more useful, Kanter said.

“What we hear from many of our customers is they go from a universe with 10 tabs open on their computer to just being able to go to Grid Status.”

David A. Naylor, CEO of Rayburn Electric Cooperative, agreed that collecting this real-time data in one dashboard has been valuable for his organization, which operates transmission and generation for four distribution cooperatives that serve over 575,000 Texans. The member-owned utility was hard-hit by the massive grid outages and energy market price spikes during Winter Storm Uri in 2021, and had been working to improve its understanding of the ups and downs of the increasingly stressed-out ERCOT grid.

“The real-time feedback loop was what was really lacking,” he said. ​“Our operators and power supply folks are looking at real time renewable mix, solar as well as wind. They’re also looking at the reserve capacity, so they can see if we’re getting close to a load shed event or not. And they’re tracking both transmission outages and resource outages” — power lines or power plants that unexpectedly shut down — ​“because they have an impact on prices.”

To collect that data, Naylor said, ​“we could look at some of the ERCOT dashboards, but those can be kind of overwhelming — and they’re all over the place.” Rayburn started to work on developing its own tools to bring these data sources together, but ​“when we ran across Grid Status, we noticed how seamless it was, how fast it updated. It made a lot of sense for us to pivot.”

Rayburn had engaged in discussions with some other providers of commercial data products that supply this kind of real-time information, he noted. But ​“the ability to tailor it and include our own data was cumbersome, or discouraged.”

Kanter also highlighted this difference in approach between Grid Status and the various commercial providers of real-time consolidated grid data, which tend to be focused on serving larger and more richly resourced utilities, independent power plant operators, and energy traders.

“One of the enablers of what we see as our long-term value is that we have pretty open doors for anyone who wants access to this data,” he said. ​“We’re not just restricting it to the very highest value use cases.”

Much of the work that Grid Status has turned into paying relationships started with users experimenting with its open-source data and application programming interfaces (APIs), Kanter said. ​“People can try our product out for free before signing up for the paid version. That lets them validate we have the data they need, that our performance standards are up to theirs.”

Where Grid Status is going next

The company’s new funding should help it expand work on its latest product — one O’Connell is particularly excited about: ​“this really awesome nodal price map, where you can see where in the country the grid is stressed.”

The map is still in the beta testing stage, but Kanter said it’s ​“something we wanted to build since day one. It’s one of the most intuitive things for someone to get a grasp on regarding the complexity of the grid.” 

Each dot on the map corresponds to a node on a transmission grid at which a locational marginal price (LMP) for power is set in 5-minute to 15-minute intervals. This map is useful to power generators, energy traders, grid planners, and other energy industry actors who need price information — but it can also indicate where lack of transmission capacity or electricity supply is putting specific parts of the grid under stress.

Grid Status has put a lot of work into securing and updating the various data sources required to capture LMPs at 20,000 nodes across the continental U.S. ​“If you just want the fuel mix for one region of the country, you can build that one-off data source,” Kanter said. ​“But the moment you need to combine 10 different sets of data, and recreate it and visualize it — and conduct high-performance querying of that data so it’s fast — that’s transformative for many industries.”

Now that the legwork is done, the company is looking at what it can do next with what it’s built, he said. ​“We want to add more tools for aggregating what’s happening on the map,” such as overlaying data on the transmission lines and substations connecting them. That could potentially help explain why two nodes that are close to each other geographically may be experiencing wildly different pricing, for example, possibly pointing to a need to build more power lines that could alleviate the problem.

From the perspective of GridLab’s O’Connell, the availability of open-sourced, real-time data like this new map — and other Grid Status offerings — is critical to understanding how the power grid is changing as more and more renewables come online.

To date, efforts to open-source grid data have focused on historical information, like the datasets developed by the worker-owned cooperative Catalyst Cooperative, which has helped inform research into grid planning and carbon emissions impacts, he noted.

The real-time data Grid Status deals with is harder to access in comparison, he said — but it also makes it much easier for analysts, journalists, and clean-energy advocates to understand complex grid issues as they unfold. That includes the role that renewable energy can play in making the grid more resilient in the face of extreme weather, for example.

In fact, O’Connell learned about Kanter’s early work while doing research with Alison Silverstein, an energy analyst and former adviser to the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, on the role of different generation resources during the Winter Storm Uri grid disaster in Texas.

Amid the crisis, Republican politicians in Texas attempted to cast blame on frozen wind turbines for the loss of generation capacity that forced the state to cut off power for millions of Texans during a week of subzero temperatures. But the data quickly revealed that the primary culprits were cold-weather-related failures at fossil gas wells, pipelines, and power plants.

“We wanted a good source of information that was clear and easy to understand what was really going on,” O’Connell said. ​“We started to scope out tools — and then it turns out that Max had already built them.”