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.