OATI Asks DOE to Fund PowerNow, a Software Plan to Free 10% to 20% of Existing Transmission Capacity
- Capacity & Wholesale Markets News Policy & Markets
Marin Holt
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- 6 minutes read
- DOE program applied to: $1.9 billion SPARK
- Claimed capacity gain: 10% to 20%
- Oregon pilot capacity freed: 80 MW
- Share of U.S. bulk power transactions on OATI software: 95%
Open Access Technology International has asked the Department of Energy to pay for widening the grid without new wire. The Minneapolis software firm sits behind roughly 95% of U.S. bulk power transactions. Its bid targets the $1.9 billion SPARK program. The plan, called PowerNow, promises 10% to 20% more usable transmission capacity on participating systems. No new line or tower is required. DOE expects to notify applicants during August 2026. Formal award announcements start in October.
Why It Matters
For a buyer procuring power for a large load, PowerNow is a schedule argument rather than a capacity argument. Reconductoring and new lines run for years. A software rating change lands in months. The freed capacity appears in the same interconnection queues where data centers now sit. The caution is that 10% to 20% describes participating systems in favorable conditions. It is not a grid-wide guarantee.
What PowerNow Bundles
PowerNow packages three things that already exist separately. The first is software-based dynamic line rating. It recalculates how much current a conductor carries safely. The inputs are live weather data, conductor characteristics, geospatial information and AI-assisted thermal modeling. OATI says the ratings follow IEEE 738 and IEEE 1283. The second piece coordinates neighboring transmission operators in near real time. A rating increase on one system then becomes visible to the next. The third piece dispatches flexible resources with AI.
What Has Actually Been Proven
The evidence is real but thin. A pilot in Oregon with Portland General Electric and the startup GridCARE freed more than 80 MW. OATI announced a partnership with National Grid in New York in March. Elia, the Belgian transmission operator, reports roughly a 30% average increase from dynamic ratings. That result comes from outside the U.S. and from a longer run of data. Canary Media puts the nationwide prize for dynamic line rating near 80 GW. That figure covers the whole technology class, not the OATI product.
The blocker is not the arithmetic. FERC required transmission owners to move to ambient adjusted ratings by July 2025. Much of the industry still operates on conservative static assumptions. Aidan Tuohy of the Electric Power Research Institute says nobody predicts weather perfectly. The hard part is carrying that uncertainty into an operating decision. Georg Rute, chief executive of Gridraven, puts it more plainly. Engineers do not trust a weather forecast enough to raise a line rating on one. No disclosed pilot yet shows the multi-operator coordination that the second piece needs.
Critical Perspective
OATI claims PowerNow frees 10% to 20% of existing transmission capacity. However, Elia’s reported 30% increase in Belgium relied on a longer data history and was not specific to OATI’s bundled approach. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Smart Grid Investment Grant program, which aimed to modernize the grid, faced significant implementation challenges and did not always deliver projected benefits. Given that engineers currently distrust weather forecasts for operating decisions, what happens when OATI’s AI-assisted thermal modeling encounters unforeseen extreme weather events not captured in its training data?
