It's Thursday. The cheapest new transmission capacity might be the lines already strung across the country. The company whose software quietly runs underneath most of the grid says it can prove it, with AI and a lot of weather data.
In today's edition:
🔌 OATI pitches AI line ratings to unlock 20% more grid capacity
☀️ Quick Hits: a desert megabattery, the first all-in-one US solar factory, an early reactor restart
💰 Capital: Helion's $465M fusion raise and a $35B AI-power megadeal
📋 Policy Watch: FERC's looming large-load order and new inverter rules
📊 Chart: solar and storage own a record build-out year
The Big Story
OATI pitches AI to unlock 20% more grid capacity.
Open Access Technology International, the Minneapolis firm whose software nearly every North American transmission operator already runs, unveiled a plan to layer AI-driven dynamic line ratings onto that platform so neighboring grid operators automatically share real-time and forecast line capacity. The company says the upgrade could lift capacity 10 to 20% across participating systems by 2030 without building a single new tower. It made the pitch in a May proposal for an undisclosed slice of the Department of Energy's $1.9 billion SPARK program for reconductoring and advanced transmission tech.
"What we can do is across 95% of North America. There's a speed and scale there that's unique, and the administration has said they want fast, durable, and cost-effective solutions."
Partners already signed on include grid operators CAISO, NYISO, and SPP, plus utilities Dominion, Duke, NextEra's Florida Power & Light, PacifiCorp, and Portland General Electric, and the cooperatives Great River Energy and Lakeland Electric.
Dynamic line ratings use live weather and grid data to calculate a line's true, constantly shifting capacity, which is often higher than its static rating; the DOE has estimated that wide deployment could free up roughly 80 GW of existing capacity.
OATI plans to run its AI platform, Genie, already live with CAISO for two years, on top of the data to forecast available headroom days and weeks ahead.
OATI expects the project to translate into real grid capacity in its third and fourth years, fast for transmission, where a single new line can take decades.
Quick Hits
Small bites from across the grid.
Five technology stories from across the stack this week, from a new long-duration cell to the chip swap inside the latest microinverters.
Hithium unveiled the mass-production version of its 6.9 MW/55.2 MWh system, an 8-hour "native" long-duration battery built on a new 1,300 Ah LFP cell sized for data-center duty cycles. pv magazine
CATL showed a sodium-ion storage container that fits 3.07 MWh into a standard 20-foot footprint and claims 15,000 cycles, a chemistry that holds up better than lithium in heat, with mass shipments due in the third quarter. Energy-Storage.news
Suntech launched its Ultra T 3.0 quarter-cut module on TOPCon 3.0 cells, with conversion efficiency above 27.5% and bifaciality up to 90%, near the top of what mass-produced silicon can do. PV Tech
Enphase detailed the gallium-nitride bi-directional switches behind its newest microinverters, the chip change driving roughly 97.5% conversion efficiency and higher power density in distributed power electronics. pv magazine
Qcells started making cells at Cartersville, the first US plant to run ingots, wafers, cells, and modules under one roof, the vertical integration that has lived almost entirely in China. Latitude Media
Partner Session Rewind
Webinar: How utility analysts build enterprise apps without IT.
Integ's Amit Patel and Rashed Khan demoed DOTA, the company's AI app builder for energy companies, showing how an analyst can turn data into secure, deployable dashboards and apps in minutes, work that usually takes weeks of IT time.
Output is software, not AI. Once tested, a dashboard runs the same every time and gets security-scanned. The team calls it "glass box AI" because the code stays visible.
Data stays governed. Access is read-only and data never goes to the model, only column names, types, and a few sample rows.
Connects to existing systems. Databases, Excel, PDFs, SCADA, PI, and ISO feeds, with demos of NERC outage analysis, EAF forecasting, and solar KPIs.
Analysts keep control. A "knowledge" library stores your formulas so the AI applies them consistently, and dashboards deploy like Power BI.
Integ is offering free sandbox access to subscribers! Schedule a demo here.
The Capital Stack
Helion raises $465M to build a fusion plant for Microsoft.
Helion closed a $465 million Series G led by Thrive Capital at a $15.5 billion valuation, the largest fusion round of the year, to fund US manufacturing and build Orion, its first power plant, now under construction in Malaga, Washington. The raise pushes a fusion developer past the lab-milestone stage and onto a construction site with a named hyperscaler offtake, a signal of how aggressively capital is now betting on firm, clean power for AI load. Ford executive chairman Bill Ford, Lux Capital, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2 joined the round.
Source: TechCrunch
Also in the capital stack:
Apollo led a $35 billion financing package with Blackstone and global banks for Broadcom's AI XPV platform, built to stand up more than 20 GW of compute for frontier labs including Anthropic and OpenAI through 2028, a sign that the power and infrastructure behind AI is now being bundled into a single financeable product at utility scale. GlobeNewswire
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Policy Watch
Jeffrey Rissman and Eric Gimon argue the rush to behind-the-meter gas plants at data centers will raise bills for everyone else, a case that strengthens grid-connected and flexible interconnection over isolated on-site generation. Utility Dive
Volts' David Roberts digs into why NERC is alarmed by data centers, landing on the same fix regulators keep circling: make big loads flexible and pair them with storage, which would push load-flexibility and battery tech to the front of the interconnection line. Volts
Chart of the Day
Solar and storage own a record year for US grid additions.
US developers plan a record 86 GW of new utility-scale capacity in 2026, with solar at 51%, battery storage at 28%, and wind at 14%. Battery additions alone jump from 15 GW in 2025 to a planned 24 GW.
Source: EIA Today in Energy · June 2026
