SunShot and Beyond: What’s Next for Kevala

On Wednesday, the United States Department of Energy SunShot Initiative announced that Kevala was awarded a $1.7 million grant to build out our Grid Assessor platform. Grid Assessor helps developers reduce the risk and cost of building their projects – and optimize the forecasted value of the assets – with sophisticated analytics and detailed grid mapping down to the local level across the United States.

This grant is a watershed moment for Kevala, both a strong validation of our work to date and an important catalyst for us to take our products and the company to the next level. But in concrete terms, what does this mean and what can you expect to see from us in the next few months?

The short answer is: a lot.

Expanding our dataset

Our products are built on a foundation of data.  This ranges from street level geospatial data that we use to map the components of the electrical grid, to extensive wholesale pricing data on which we can build more refined algorithms. We extend the analyses to broader datasets about weather patterns, demographics and economic impact. In the next months, we will be expanding our dataset in all 50 US states and opening portions of it up to academic institutions. If your organization would be interested in becoming a data partner, please send an email to ideas@kevalaanalytics.com.

Deepening our analytics
Today, our platform includes a variety of analytics, most notably our Integration Capacity Analysis (ICA) calculation, which determines how much distributed energy generation could potentially be connected to a feeder without triggering the need for a costly (and potentially lengthy) interconnect study. In addition to adding the ICA in more states, we will roll out more pricing analysis, regulatory intelligence tools, and nuanced forecasting features in platform to help developers make more informed decisions about new project investments. To learn more about how we think data will change the solar energy industry in the next five years, sign up for access to our new whitepaper.

Enhancing our product
Building on the other two facets of our roadmap, our high-level product goals are two-fold and related: become the default decision-making tool for the energy industry in the United States, and create a product that people enjoy using. In the coming months, we will talk to more of our existing and prospective customers to deepen our understanding of how we can make the process of developing a renewable energy project better, more predictable and more profitable.

In the last few weeks, we have been working on making our user interface simpler and more intuitive to capitalize on and showcase our data and analytics. In the next few months, we will be gathering customer feedback to further enhance our interface, and adding forecasting and calculation tools to integrate smoothly with the rest of developers’ workflows while meeting their data needs.

We also know that some customers might want to access our data outside of the platform, and have projects planned to enable clients to integrate Kevala information and analytics with their own applications.

To see our product live, request a free trial, or just talk about how we might be able to help make your current process more efficient and data-driven, contact sales@kevalaanalytics.com. For product feedback, you can also email me directly (eleanor@).

Growing the team
To make all of this a reality, we plan to add new Kevaliers, particularly increasing bench strength in data science and on our software development team, that works with a tech stack that includes geoServer, Django, Python, PostgeSQL, Open Layers and JavaScript, to name a few. We are particularly interested in talking with people who have a demonstrated passion for the energy industry, skilled data wranglers and data scientists, and software developers with startup experience who want help build an engineering team with an unwavering focus on both technical excellence and continuous learning.

These are exciting times! All of us here would like to thank our current customers for their business and the SunShot Initiative for their support. We’re all looking forward to building a more data-driven future for the energy industry.