Pearl Street is on a mission to undo the queue

Pearl Street Technologies was the first-place winner of the 2024 DISTRIBUTECH International Initiate Start-up Program. After the event, I had a lovely call with co-founder and CEO David Bromberg, who shared the company’s origin story, explained how his products aim to mitigate the interconnection backlog, and walked me down his personal path to Pearl Street.

A lifetime tinkerer

Tinkering with stuff is healthy, especially when you’re a kid. The National Association for the Education of Young Children says it’s how youngsters begin to use their senses to explore the physical properties of the world around them.

“They tinker as they take things apart, put things together, figure out how things work, and attempt to build and make creations using tools,” reads an excerpt from a Forbes article. “When they are faced with a problem, children ask questions, make plans, work together, test their ideas, solve problems, improve their ideas to make them better, and share their ideas and creations with others. These are the thinking processes and actions that scientists and engineers use.”

Anecdotally, it seems like a lot of those types get their first taste for blood by pulling apart a flashlight or remote control. David Bromberg, founder and CEO of interconnection software solutions company Pearl Street Technologies, is among them.

“Incidentally, I did take many flashlights apart when I was a kid,” he confesses when I ask. “Why? Is that a thing? Why did you use that as an example?”

To be honest, he just seemed like the type- and I don’t mean that in a bad way. Bromberg looks and sounds like someone you’d trust to take something apart, put it back together, and return it in a condition better than he found it. And sure enough!

“I was definitely a tinkerer, although I’ve been doing less of that now as I’m older,” he admits. “But one of my weird little side hobbies was fixing broken electronics. When I was an undergrad in college, we found a big flatscreen TV someone was just throwing out. Flatscreen TVs weren’t so common then. So we took it, and I fixed it.”

“And then we had a free giant flatscreen TV. So that was cool,” Bromberg concludes.

That must’ve made you a popular guy in college!

“Totally, yeah.” Bromberg sarcastically replies.

“Actually, I remember one of the gifts I got when I was really young was a flashlight kit. Like, you built your own hand-cranked flashlight or something,” Bromberg recalls.

Many years later, while in grad school at Carnegie Mellon, he would help his PhD advisor (and accomplished professional poker player) Larry Pileggi rework the undergrad circuits class. In the spirit of making the labs more fun, Bromberg introduced a hand-cranked cell phone charger- a modern twist on the simple mechanics that have always captivated him.

“Very similar to the flashlight thing,” Bromberg realizes.

“I did not realize this was going to be a therapy session,” he later tells me.

Oh, my friend. It is, and it isn’t.

But why don’t you just get comfortable, and let’s start at the beginning?

The grid is just one big circuit, man

David Bromberg grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He moved to Pittsburgh to study electrical and computer engineering, where he earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees.

“My background was never really in power systems or the electric grid,” Bromberg divulges. “I was actually more in applied physics and logic circuits built out of tiny little magnets. A very, very long story.”

As much as I’d love to use this space to tell a winding tale about itty-bitty magnets, we press on.

“But my PhD advisor (Pileggi)- his background primarily is in the electronic design automation industry, which is a fancy umbrella term for simulation and optimization software for electronic circuits, for computer chips, essentially,” Bromberg details.

Pileggi was the 2023 recipient of the Phil Kaufman Award, recognized as the “Nobel Prize” for lifetime achievement in electric design automation. He is part of a long lineage of innovators in that space, boasts Bromberg.

“When we started the research that would later become Pearl Street, we were really just looking at grid analysis from an academic perspective,” Bromberg explains. “Could we build a simulator for the electric power grid that internally looks a lot like the simulation tools used for every other circuit on the planet?”

After all, they figured, the power grid is nothing more than an electrical circuit spread out over a massive geographical area.

If you’ve never considered that before, let it sink in for a second. The grid is just a really big circuit. We’re all just big circuits, maannnnn.

“It’s very large, but actually in terms of the size of the network, if you think about it mathematically, it’s orders of magnitude smaller than a computer chip,” Bromberg asserts. “A computer chip is physically very small, but under the hood, it has billions of components and is much more complicated. The circuit representing the power grid is so much smaller than a computer chip. Why is it modeled and simulated in such a strange way?”

“I guess you could describe it as a moment of confusion, rather than clarity, almost.”

Armed with this insight, they set out to build a simulation and optimization platform for the power grid. As academics tend to do, Bromberg admits, they wrote a bunch of papers about it.

“It was a lot of fun. It was a side project for me,” he says. “The students who took over the research, including Pearl Street’s now-chief technologist Marko Jereminov, did most of the groundbreaking work.” (You and I, David, might have different definitions of what constitutes a fun side project, but I digress).

Bromberg remained at CMU for a year of postdoctoral research, then departed the nest of academia.

“I was there for quite a while. Eight years, two months, and ten days, to be exact,” he chuckles. “But who’s counting?”

Bromberg went off to work at Aurora Solar, building software tools to accelerate residential and commercial solar deployment. He got a taste for startups and climate tech, and before long, decided to try to start his own- moving back to Pittsburgh and co-founding Pearl Street with Pileggi. A third co-founder, Hui Zheng, joined shortly after.

Pearl Street is born

“When we started Pearl Street, we weren’t focused on interconnection,” Bromberg reveals. “I would characterize what we were doing as software to support more general-purpose transmission planning.”

But then a pair of “aha moments” changed Pearl Street’s tune.

The first was an article about Southwest Power Pools and MISO’s JTIQ effort. “They were performing joint analysis to optimize transmission upgrades,” Bromberg recalls. “I was like, oh, that sounds interesting. And it sounds like an application for our software technology to help support the modeling.”

Bromberg sent a cold email to David Kelley, who managed SPP’s generation interconnection at the time, recommending his software as a solution. To his shock, Kelley responded. One email begot another, which prompted larger meetings, and ultimately, Bromberg was left with the realization that interconnection is a massive problem.

“I mean, the complexity and the magnitude of the problems they were dealing with… It just clicked that there’s a real need for technology innovation,” Bromberg concluded. “And that core technology, the foundation that we had built? This was like the application that folks at ISOs and utilities are really asking for.”

“Interconnection is fraught with suffering and pain for everyone involved. Transmission providers have to deal with a massive volume of interconnection applications and developers enter the queues without any ability to forecast their projects’ interconnection risk. We thought, certainly technology can help, right?“

– David Bromberg, co-founder of Pearl Street

Another inspirational spark came from a project developer struggling with interconnection issues- specifically around an expensive upgrade that was being purportedly triggered per an interconnection study. They reached out to Bromberg’s team and asked if their software could identify more optimal upgrades in the transmission system that would allow them to connect at a lower cost.

“We said: ‘I don’t know, but we’ll try it!'” Bromberg recalls. “So we did the analysis and we actually found solutions that I think were 40 or 50x cheaper.”

Pearl Street prepared a report and the developer took it to the ISO.

“I don’t think anything actually came of it, because that’s not necessarily a straightforward process to get alternative upgrades approved,” he admits. “But it was just another really interesting moment for us where we realized that we had solutions not just for ISOs and utilities, but we could build new capabilities for developers to help them better manage the interconnection process from their perspective.”

“It just so happens that one of the applications of the technology that we built helps accelerate the analysis done to support all this,” Bromberg adds. “And so we really seized on that and that’s become the focus of the business.

Interconnection solutions

“Interconnection is a huge pain point in the industry right now, and it’s across the board,” Bromberg pontificates. “It’s not just ISOs and utilities dealing with it. It’s renewable energy and storage developers dealing with it. It’s off-takers who are trying to procure renewable energy to power load. PPA brokers, capital providers, regulators, policymakers, everybody is grappling with this.”

Pearl Street Technologies offers two software automation products for utility-scale interconnection solutions, which Bromberg presented as part of this year’s Initiate Startup Program at DISTRIBUTECH International. They won the competition.

“Everywhere you go, everybody is always hammering on the problems. But until recently, there’s been so little discourse on solutions, and what we wanted to do more of was talk about how this is a terrible problem, but there are solutions that exist that could help alleviate it.”

– David Bromberg, co-founder and CEO of Pearl Street Technologies

The Interconnect platform is for project developers and PPA broker-type clients. It aggregates publicly available data to pull interconnection queues into one place. It includes a paid simulation platform that allows its users to conduct end-to-end studies. Developers can insert a project into a specific queue and analyze the risk of triggering upgrade costs or bound their expenses on a high and low scale.

“Ultimately, whenever you come to solutions, it shows you what the actual upgrade costs are, and then it plots those out for you,” illustrates Pearl Street engineer Nicholas Linder. “So you can see how as the queue changes, your costs change.”

Pearl Street’s other offering is called SUGAR, intended to assist grid operators and utilities in managing interconnection queue volumes by simulating power flow. It plugs directly into existing transmission and interconnection planning workflows and supports customizable study processes, like Interconnect (which is actually built on the SUGAR platform).

Pearl Street Technologies’ software has been used to power the interconnection studies of close to 200 GW of projects. The company’s CEO expects that number to balloon this year as they add potential ISO and utility customers.

“That’s exciting for us,” Bromberg beams. “I mean, that is actual impact… If even a small fraction of those projects come online, that’s a pretty big achievement.”

Burning down industry silos (and not any actual buildings, hopefully)

If the name Pearl Street sounds familiar, it’s because the company borrows its moniker from Pearl Street Station, the first commercial power plant in the United States, constructed in lower Manhattan by Thomas Edison. It burned down.

“We didn’t consider the demise,” offers Bromberg. “We just considered the milestone, you know?”

I guess Titanic Cruise Lines would be fair game, then, if someone wants to tout their really big boat.

“I do not know why it burned down, but it did,” Bromberg adds. “I hope not to say the same thing about Pearl Street Technologies in a few years.”

“Maybe not the best name for a startup company in hindsight, but I’d like to think that if we’re gonna go out, we would go out in a similar blaze of glory.”

Join us at GridTECH Connect California, June 24-26, 2024, in Newport Beach, CA! With some of the most ambitious sustainability and clean energy goals in the country, California is at the cutting edge of the energy transition while confronting its most cumbersome roadblocks. From electric vehicles to battery storage, microgrids, community solar, and everything in between, attendees will collaborate to advance interconnection procedures and policies in California.

Instead, it seems like Pearl Street Technologies is really hitting its stride. They’re a lean 16 employees strong (but hiring!) and still learning just how big of an impact their software might have. Bromberg is fielding requests about distribution-level interconnection and receiving lots of interest from data center and transmission-connected EV supercharging developers hoping to manage massive loads as inexpensively as possible.

“We have some interesting ideas related to some talk in the industry right now about holistic transmission planning and knocking down some silos in the industry,” Bromberg teases when asked about his future plans. He also sees new applications for Interconnect.

“That product that we built for renewable energy developers is an end-to-end interconnection study automation platform,” he continues. “It runs an interconnection study in full, on-demand, in an hour. It’s not a perfect replacement for what you might think of as a production study run by an ISO or utility, but I think it’s a proof point that you can automate a lot of this.”

Bromberg wants to take the next logical step- having an ISO or utility leverage Pearl Street’s software to accelerate processing interconnection requests.

“I would love to get to where there’s almost a rolling queue submission window every 30 days,” Bromberg envisions. “Here’s a batch of projects. Run a study. Next day, decision point. Keep going. I think that that is an achievable future where interconnection is no longer a bottleneck for the energy transition.”

That reality is still theoretical, but there’s tinkering going on behind the scenes toward that end. And as the industry discovers its offerings, opportunities keep popping up for Pearl Street. Bromberg recognizes not many companies have been able to break into this space and grow into the position he’s in.

“It’s funny, when you start a company where your customer base is utilities and grid operators, nobody wants to talk to you,” laughs Pearl Street’s co-founder. Investors seem to think those entities are terrible customers.

“Well, perhaps that’s a bit unfair,” he offers. “They’re good customers if you can get them, but it’s not an easy lift.”

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