It's Thursday. Every transmission line keeps spare room for the day something breaks. A startup in Chile found a way to put that empty lane to work, and now it is pitching U.S. data centers on helping hold it open.
In today's edition:
📅 Event: Grid Innovation Hub coffee meetup at 9Zero, San Francisco, Nov. 12
⚡ Big Story: Splight lifts Chilean wind corridors 60% with software and batteries
🔋 Quick Hits: CATL's 9 MWh box, Empire Wind's quiet site, FirstEnergy tests DLR
💰 Capital Stack: DOE's $10.1B for uprates and Alliant
📋 Policy Watch: California counts DERs as capacity, NRC speeds reactor reviews
📊 Chart of the Day: heat pumps and the spare winter grid
But first…
📅 Event Announcement: Grid Innovation Coffee Meetup (In-Person)
Presented by Grid Innovation Hub
Thursday, November 12 · In person at 9Zero Climate Innovation Hub, 350 California St, 4th floor, San Francisco · Hosted by Adam Shaw - 9 AM PST
Join fellow grid professionals for an in-person coffee chat on advanced technology strategies and implementations on the power grid. The conversation spans generation, transmission and distribution, grid modernization, project development, operations and compliance, and venture capital, and it runs on crowd-sourced problems rather than slides. No presentations. No sales.
Grid Innovation Hub subscribers are encouraged to register for the next session.
The Big Story
Splight's software lifts Chilean wind corridors' usable capacity 60%
Splight's dynamic congestion management software raised usable capacity by 60% on two 220-kV transmission corridors in Southern Chile that carry power from seven wind farms to a major substation, Latitude Media reported. Instead of holding capacity in reserve for faults, it coordinates batteries and other assets to ramp down within milliseconds if a line trips. It went live earlier this year.
"We are asking the data center to serve as a resource for the utility."
The system continuously assesses more than 877 MW of wind capacity and should add around 41,000 MWh of renewable generation a year, according to the company.
Chile curtailed more than 6 TWh of wind and solar last year.
Splight raised $12.4 million last year for its U.S. expansion and says it is in talks with utilities and developers about connecting large loads faster. No U.S. customers are named.
Source: Latitude Media
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Quick Hits
Small bites from across the grid.
Denser batteries, smarter wires, and one wind farm that hasn't shown up yet.
CATL unveiled its 9 MWh Tener+ storage system at All-Energy Australia, saying it cuts a project's containers by 40% and footprint by 35%. ESS News
Empire Wind shows no sign of turbine construction in satellite imagery reviewed by Grid Status, with under a year left before the 810 MW project's Sept. 2027 operation date, while Sunrise Wind has at least 27 turbines up. Grid Status
FirstEnergy said its KATCo transmission unit will host an estimated $20.8 million EPRI-led pilot, co-funded by DOE, of dynamic line ratings and advanced power flow controllers on a western Pennsylvania line starting in early 2027. PR Newswire
Caelux signed a five-year deal with India's INA Solar to produce 3 GW of perovskite-on-TOPCon "hybrid tandem" modules, targeting commercial production by 2028 and an anticipated 29% efficiency. PV Tech
Unitil signed a three-year deal to use Rhizome's climate and wildfire risk software to prioritize resilience spending in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Renewable Energy World
The Capital Stack
DOE lines up $10.1 billion for nuclear uprates and Alliant's buildout
DOE's Office of Energy Dominance Financing, formerly the Loan Programs Office, offered Constellation a conditional commitment of up to $5 billion for almost 1.1 GW of uprates at eight nuclear plants in PJM and MISO, Utility Dive reported. It also closed two loans totaling $5.1 billion to Alliant Energy for more than 2.6 GW of new gas plants, energy storage and upgrades to existing generation.
Source: Utility Dive
Also in the capital stack:
Fervo shares are down 70% from their first day of trading as the AI stock selloff spills into clean energy, with Form Energy and Holtec among companies that shelved IPOs, Latitude Media's Open Circuit noted. Latitude Media
Policy Watch
California's SB 913, signed Sept. 30, gives the CPUC until June 2028 to lay the groundwork for DER aggregations to count as resource adequacy capacity, a potential capacity revenue stream for VPPs; SB 905 requires utilities to report grid-utilization data. Utility Dive
The NRC finalized a rule, effective Nov. 25, letting advanced reactor applicants reuse safety evaluations and testing completed under DOE or DOD authorization, targeting about 18-month reviews for first-of-a-kind designs, which could shorten the path from test reactor to commercial license. Power Engineering
Thailand's government approved a THB50 billion (US$1.48 billion) People's Solar program subsidizing rooftop systems on one million homes, targeting 5 GW of behind-the-meter capacity on its distribution grids. PV Tech
Chart of the Day:
Heat pumps fit inside the winter grid in about half of states
Adding heat pumps could cut residential electricity rates by 13% on average, roughly $200 a year, against where inflation would otherwise take them, across the 24 states plus Washington, D.C., that RMI analyzed. About half of states have spare winter capacity; Michigan could add 3.6 million heat pumps and lower rates by as much as 27%.
Source: Canary Media · October 28, 2026
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