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National Grid Partners

With the energy demands of artificial intelligence, the rise of electric vehicles and looming government mandates to cut emissions, utility companies are hyper-focused on adding capacity to the grid. But bringing major energy infrastructure projects online can often take years, thanks to extensive regulatory reviews, community input and construction timelines. So we need a secret weapon.

The startup landscape is full of innovative companies that have the potential to solve today’s biggest challenges — if their ideas can scale. The problem? Startups want to move much more quickly than regulated utilities are typically accustomed to. So how can we integrate these new products and technologies into our networks and scale them to accelerate the energy transition?

National Grid Partners, the venture investment and innovation arm of National Grid, serves as an essential bridge between utilities and startups. The two are a bit like Venus and Mars: They just don’t speak each other's language. National Grid Partners helps translate both sides and enable the conversation.

When we invest in a startup, we don’t just offer financial support; we form a close strategic relationship. We speak with National Grid business units about new technologies and how they can best be deployed. It’s hugely rewarding to tell colleagues about a startup that can quickly solve one of their biggest challenges.

On the flip side, the National Grid Partners business development team helps startups navigate the process of working with a regulated utility. That means everything from understanding the subtleties of procurement to introducing potential customers at National Grid — and at more than 130 other utilities that participate in our NextGrid Alliance.

A good example of this collaborative role is TS Conductor. The California startup’s next-generation electric wires let utilities dramatically improve the capacity of existing transmission lines without the need for new infrastructure.

The biggest challenge in the renewable space today isn’t generating electricity from green sources like wind and solar — it’s capacity constraints on the transmission grid carrying that electricity to where it’s needed. It was clear to us that TS Conductor’s technology could be a game-changer; the steel-and-aluminum design of most power lines hasn’t changed in decades and simply can’t handle today's soaring demand for electricity. If the startup’s carbon-core transmission conductors worked as advertised, it would be a huge deal — not just for National Grid but for the entire industry.

But TS Conductor hadn’t even reached the manufacturing stage when we first met with them in 2021. Our investment team helped the young company understand what National Grid would require to deploy its conductors in future infrastructure projects. This included navigating the utility’s rigorous type registration process — an industry-leading standard for qualifying new products and manufacturers.

After all, when providing power to tens of millions of people across Great Britain and the northeastern United States, National Grid has to ensure vendors and their technologies are reliable, scalable, affordable, and safe. It’s simply not acceptable for a new technology not to work once put in place.

This is one reason why National Grid puts a premium on full traceability in the manufacturing process. So although TS Conductor already had aimed to set up an Enterprise Resource Planning system to track its manufacturing operations, we advised the company to make it a key priority. In fact, we said: “If you want to work with National Grid, setting up an ERP is something you need to do right now.” Knowing what to prioritize is crucial for startups, since they’re always juggling a hundred different things.

Tackling the biggest energy challenges

National Grid Partners also has been finding ways to increase capacity without the need to replace conductors at all. Last year, National Grid integrated “dynamic line rating” technology from our portfolio company LineVision into our operations control room in Syracuse, New York. This gives grid operators real-time data to identify where there’s capacity to safely increase power to a particular line.

LineVision’s sensors use LiDAR to measure line sag that indicates if a particular conductor is running too hot for safety. By providing real-time data on line conditions, LineVision field tests had uncovered an additional 20-30 percent of underutilized capacity on our lines that older, static line rating models had not been designed for. And since the sensors are installed on transmission towers, not on the transmission lines themselves, they can be installed relatively quickly, without requiring planned outages

But even though the startup’s sensors provide a faster solution to congestion than building new transmission rights of way, the integration project involved a year of testing and pilots to make sure the technology not only was effective but could integrate safely into the control room. Today, the Syracuse deployment is the largest operationalization of dynamic line rating in the United States. And National Grid is preparing to deploy the technology on other parts of our network.

An innovative way to find more line capacity

Even as we find ways to increase the capacity of existing lines, we’ll of course also need to build new infrastructure to meet future electrification demands. We believe startup technology can speed this lengthy process as well.

Last spring, National Grid Partners invested in Transcend, a Software-as-a-Service platform that fully automates the preliminary engineering of critical infrastructure, including electrical substations. This generative design software can help utilities make smarter, faster decisions when planning transmission routes — and dramatically reduce the time to complete new projects.

These kinds of insights and connections are essential for innovative ideas to flourish in the traditionally cautious world of regulated utilities, where reliability, safety and affordability are paramount. National Grid Partners was launched to help startups and National Grid business units understand each other — and, from there, to collaborate on new solutions.

And through the NextGrid Alliance, those solutions can be promoted around the world. Utility companies face common challenges in delivering power while cutting emissions. As regulated monopolies, they largely don’t compete with one another — so when a utility deploys a successful solution, many other utilities can learn from it. Thanks to National Grid’s vetting and endorsement, the NextGrid Alliance has brokered more than 100 introductions between startups and utilities since early 2023.

Ultimately, National Grid Partners offers much more than capital or simple customer-vendor transactions. We help foster deeper strategic relationships, so everyone is working together toward shared goals — and speaking the same language.

Getting new infrastructure projects up and running faster

Pradeep Tagare is Vice President and Head of Investments at National Grid Partners, the venture investment and innovation arm of National Grid plc. He previously spent 13 years at Intel Capital in Silicon Valley and India, leading 16 investments that resulted in 10 exits. Prior to that, Pradeep spent 12 years in technology/product marketing roles at Silicon Valley startups including Inference, BroadVision and Healtheon; he also founded Yopa, a mobile middleware software company that was acquired by XDrive/AOL. Pradeep holds an M.S.E.E. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a BE (EE) from the University of Bombay, and is a Kauffman Fellow.

By Pradeep Tagare, National Grid Partners

Venus and Mars: Translating Between Startups and the Energy Industry