Grid startup Splight’s dynamic congestion management software is now being used to increase the capacity of two transmission corridors in Chile, targeting chronic renewables curtailment across the country’s windy south.
Instead of relying on empty wires to absorb grid shocks, Splight’s software taps capacity from batteries or other assets on the grid itself, coordinating them to ramp down rapidly if a line trips. That reduces the need to hold line capacity in reserve, allowing more power to flow under normal conditions. It’s a distinct approach from technologies that primarily focus on monitoring the status of the grid, like dynamic line rating, which refines estimates of how much power lines can safely carry based on weather.
In Chile, the country’s abundant solar and wind resources are often far from its major load centers, resulting in a transmission bottleneck. Last year Chile curtailed more than 6 terawatt-hours of wind and solar, partly because the grid couldn’t move it to where it was needed.
Now, Splight says its system has increased usable capacity by 60% on two 220-kV corridors in Southern Chile, which carry power from several of the country’s largest wind farms to a major substation, and then on to the national grid and major population centers further north.
The system, which went live on the two lines earlier this year, continuously assesses more than 877 megawatts across seven wind farms in the region. Splight says the system can trigger automated, millisecond-level ramp-downs from the farms if a circuit fails, while allowing them to inject more power during normal conditions. The corridors are expected to deliver around 41,000 megawatt-hours of additional renewable generation a year, according to the company. That’s roughly the annual electricity consumption of 20,000 homes in the country.
The deployment in Chile, though focused on the generation side, offers a proof point for using fast-responding resources to help get new customers hooked up to the grid faster.
Now Splight is charting an expansion into the U.S. market, having raised $12.4 million last year to fund the endeavor. The company is pitching its technology to utilities looking to connect large new loads, including data centers, faster while new grid infrastructure is being built, the company’s chief revenue officer Derrick Kemph told Latitude Media.
The company is in discussions with both renewable developers and utilities in the U.S., added Brent Smelter, Splight’s chief strategy and growth officer.
Batteries as the enabler
Data centers may be a good fit for Splight’s approach because they are already developing onsite power resources like batteries that could respond quickly during grid contingencies, Smelter said.
Using data centers as a grid resource also creates unique commercial structure, Smelter said. “We are asking the data center to serve as a resource for the utility,” he explained. That means deployments are necessarily coordinations between a utility and a load, which is different from a deployment of DLR, for example, he added.
In Chile, the deployment was financed by the energy companies themselves, seeking to sell more wind power into the grid. On the load side, Splight is betting data center developers will step up to play that same role.
The data centers being built for the AI boom are also better suited to serve as grid assets than those of the past, Smelter added. They’re significantly larger and tend to have one tenant , which simplifies the commercial relationship. And for every day that an AI data center isn’t operating, that’s missed revenue for all parties.
Batteries will be central to making that arrangement work, Smelter said. “Batteries are that perfect technology to help with curtailment…because if you’re going to respond to contingencies, the utility has to be able to rely on you very quickly to be able to do that.”
Part of what makes Splight’s U.S. approach timely for the market, he added, is that data center developers have spent the last few years growing their energy teams. That means they are far more sophisticated negotiators of power procurement and speed-to-power deals.
Smelter is clear that Splight is not getting into the weeds of data center flexibility, or wading into the debate over whether data centers will ramp down their compute. In fact, Splight generally assumes data center developers will instead opt for having enough onsite power to maintain normal operations during a grid contingency.
“When we say we’re moving [a data center load] to onsite power, we’re not talking about shifting workloads,” he clarified. “That’s a really hot topic with hypersalers…there are companies that are trying to work on that — we’re not touching that. We really do leave the onsite power solution to the client to size that, and hopefully not touch workloads.”
