2027 Event Agenda

Large-load and data-center interconnection requests are surging, and the studies that tell developers where the grid can absorb new load have become the bottleneck. At Dominion Energy, a full-area hosting capacity run once meant six to eight weeks of near-constant monitoring on a single engineer's laptop. This session shows how Dominion's Electric Transmission team, with engineering partner Simple Thread, moved those computationally intensive power-flow studies onto powerful centralized servers. This is cutting turnaround from weeks to hours and turning ad-hoc analysis into a repeatable, queued service. Engineers submit line-tap or bus-tap studies with real contingency analysis (N-1, N-1-1, security-constrained redispatch); the platform returns a county-level capacity heat map that gives executives a fast read on grid headroom and planners a vetted starting point for deeper study. The work earned recognition in the U.S. Department of Energy's American-Made Digitizing Utilities Prize.

What attendees will learn about:

• Diagnosing why full-area hosting capacity studies become a bottleneck (the computational cost, the weeks of constant monitoring, the single-engineer/single-laptop failure mode) and spot the same pattern in their own organization.
• How to describe an architecture that moves intensive power-flow studies off individual workstations onto centralized, higher-powered servers with automated, queued processing. Without forcing engineers to abandon the analysis they already trust.
• How to compare line-tapping (mid-line) and bus-tapping (at-station) approaches to siting new large load, and recognize when each best answers a developer's request.
• How to specify the contingency analysis that makes results defensible (N-1, N-1-1, and security-constrained redispatch) and weigh the computational trade-offs of each.
• How to turn raw output into decisions: how a county-level capacity heat map gives executives a fast read on grid headroom and gives planners a credible starting point for detailed study and investment targeting.
• How to build a roadmap to industrialize their own capacity analysis for data-center and EV-driven load growth, including where automation and concurrent multi-bus/line studies add the most leverage.