This software firm has a plan to take grid-enhancing tech nationwide

A major grid-tech company is asking the Trump administration to fund a project it says could significantly boost the nation’s ability to move power around — without building a single new transmission tower or line.

Open Access Technology International (OATI) is a Minneapolis-based firm whose software is used by nearly every North American transmission grid operator to manage the flow of electrons. Now, it envisions developing new features for that software. Huge amounts of data, parsed by artificial intelligence, would be used to more accurately calculate how much power can run along power lines — providing both real-time estimates and forecasts days and weeks into the future. That intel would be automatically shared among neighboring grid operators, allowing them to make better decisions about how to run their networks.

If all goes to plan, OATI says the facelift could accomplish a 10% to 20% increase in capacity across participating systems by 2030.

OATI unveiled its scheme in a May proposal for an undisclosed amount of money from the Department of Energy’s $1.9 billion SPARK grant program. The program uses money from the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, in a somewhat rare example of Biden-era energy funding spared from the Trump administration’s clawbacks.

The company’s proposal is a kind of ​“grid-enhancing technology,” a family of hardware and software that could squeeze more capacity out of the nation’s increasingly congested grid. These solutions have the potential to save the nation billions of dollars in excess power costs by unclogging transmission bottlenecks that prevent cheap electricity, much of it from wind and solar farms, from reaching places that need it. That could help curb skyrocketing utility bills for households and businesses.

The problem in the U.S. today is that these tools are almost exclusively deployed as pilot projects on one power line at a time. To achieve the big savings, multiple utilities and grid operators will need to use this tech in a coordinated way across the country’s region-spanning transmission networks.

OATI — with its decades of data and vast existing connections across the power industry — thinks it can catalyze that sort of large-scale deployment. It’s already enlisted a sizable group of partner organizations that have agreed to implement the new software add-ons, among them the grid operators California Independent System Operator, New York Independent System Operator, and Southwest Power Pool; the utilities Dominion Energy, Duke Energy, NextEra’s Florida Power & Light, PacifiCorp, and Portland General Electric; and the electricity cooperatives Great River Energy and Lakeland Electric.

John Engel, OATI’s associate vice president of strategic marketing, noted the company would bring significant matching funds to the table to deploy its software.

“What we can do is across 95% of North America,” Engel said. ​“There’s a speed and scale there that’s unique — and the [Trump] administration has said they want fast, durable, and cost-effective solutions.”

How does OATI’s tech work?

One of the key goals of OATI’s proposal is to deploy a version of a technology called dynamic line rating, or DLR. Over the past 20 years, DLR has evolved from devices that clip onto power lines, to sensors on transmission towers that monitor lines via optics and electromagnetics, to software-only approaches — like OATI’s — that use weather and grid data.

All these different methods have a common purpose: to determine the constantly changing true capacity of high-voltage power lines.

Quite often, that true capacity is greater than the traditional ​“static” ratings assigned to power lines, which don’t take weather and wind speed into account. For example, breezy conditions can cool lines, allowing them to safely carry more electrons at the same time that wind farms are generating the most energy.

Armed with this knowledge, operators can dispatch higher levels of power flows across parts of the grid they’d otherwise have to curtail. In a 2024 report, the DOE estimated that widely deployed DLR could increase existing grid capacity by roughly 80 gigawatts, saving billions of dollars in transmission infrastructure costs.

DLR in the U.S. has been hindered by a fractured regulatory landscape and the fact that transmission-owning utilities earn money by investing in new infrastructure, not by installing technology that makes their existing grids operate more efficiently. But players in Europe have been using the tech in a systematic way for more than a decade. Belgian grid operator Elia has achieved an average 30% increase on its transmission grid using DLR.

OATI, for its part, already has some experience tweaking line ratings based on weather, said Kevin Sarkinen, the company’s chief operations officer.

Back in 2021, federal regulators ordered all transmission operators to start using ambient adjusted ratings — essentially, hourly ratings based on daily temperature forecasts — by July 2025. OATI’s platform has already integrated those ratings into its transmission capacity calculations. ​“Now we’re adding in the capability for the DLRs,” Sarkinen said. That will bring in additional real-time data, like cloud cover, heating from the sun, and, most importantly, wind speed and direction, which have a huge impact on power line capacity.

The U.S. hasn’t been standing still on DLR. Deployments in Indiana, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and other states have shown the technology can significantly increase capacity on individual power lines.

But getting more headroom on one line only gets you so far on a networked grid that must operate as a unified whole. As a 2019 DOE report put it, ​“DLR has the potential to expand the Nation’s power highway system, but the exits and intersections must be capable of using that new capability for it to be worthwhile.”

OATI wants to leverage its broad customer base to make such an integration possible, Sarkinen noted. It will work the real-time DLR data into its software suite, which 95% of North American transmission operators use to share information about their available capacity and to manage the flow of power across networks.

The firm also plans to leverage its AI-informed Genie platform to boost the usefulness of all these figures. It’s been deploying that tech with California’s grid operator over the past two years, Engel said, processing large amounts of data to quickly decide how to safely reconfigure systems when power plants go offline or individual transmission lines are overloaded.

In this new use case, OATI’s Genie platform ​“looks at the modeling and coordination of these grid operators, and applies some AI technology to these coordination processes to increase the accuracy of the grid,” Sarkinen said. The AI applications allow for ​“constant assessment of how accurate your calculations were” as well as forecasting ​“if you want to make capacity available tomorrow or next week.”

OATI and its partners hope to start turning these technology deployments into real-world grid capacity improvements by the third and fourth years of their joint project, Sarkinen said. That’s practically light speed in the world of transmission, where construction of a single line can sometimes take decades.

The challenges of engineering a better grid

All this is easier said than done. 

OATI may not get the DOE funding, although company executives declined to comment on how that loss would alter the initiative.

And the project could face unforeseen technical hurdles and delays. The new features are still works in progress, and even though they are based on lots of data, dynamic line ratings are still just estimates. Utilities and grid operators will need to learn to trust the data for both real-time decisions and forecasts, since these organizations make commitments to transport energy hours, days, or even weeks in advance.

“We can’t perfectly predict the weather, and we have to integrate that uncertainty into how we operate the grid,” said Aidan Tuohy, director of R&D for transmission operations and planning at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit utility research organization that’s working on a range of grid-enhancing technology projects with partners including OATI. But the latest advances in AI are increasingly useful in ​“using past data to predict what’s going to happen,” he said, by cross-checking ongoing forecasts against historical data from grids operating under similar conditions.

A lack of confidence in these weather-based predictions is one of the main barriers to making the most out of DLR, said Georg Rute, CEO of Gridraven, a startup that’s deployed its technology across Finland’s national grid and relocated to Texas last year to support plans to expand in the U.S.

“What I hear from the engineers, who have a veto right at transmission companies to turn on DLR, is that they don’t have the confidence that the forecasts work,” he said. ​“That is the real blocker. It’s not so much the incentives or the regulation.”

But although sticking with the status quo may be simpler, all U.S. utilities and grid operators are under federal mandate to integrate grid-enhancing technologies into how they bring new power generation online and make long-term plans for expanding their grids — and to find near-term ways to manage strains caused by power demand from data centers.

Meanwhile, utilities are struggling to manage a ​“more complex grid, with more exchanges between regions, more data centers, more variable and distributed resources,” Tuohy said. ​“Having the data to make decisions is going to become increasingly important.”