This month, we announced the acquisition of Pearl Street Technologies by Enverus - a transformational milestone for Pearl Street, our portfolio, and the power grid at large. Today, we will explore the problem Pearl Street is solving, its unique approach, our history with the Company and what’s next.
The U.S. power grid is facing a crisis of capacity and efficiency, strained by a staggering interconnection backlog and aging infrastructure. As of 2023, roughly 2.4–2.6 terawatts of proposed generation and storage capacity were waiting in interconnection queues across the nation - for context, this is more than double the U.S. grid's capacity (enverus.com). In 2023, the median wait time for interconnection applications was 5 years.
Grid operators and developers have long relied on manual and time-consuming consultant-driven processes to evaluate the viability of connecting new projects to the grid, defined by extensive manual interconnection studies with a limited ability to do scenario planning. After months of work to manually assess a potential interconnection, results are often stale or completely unusable due to changing grid variables. New factors introduced by renewables, such as intermittency, only steepen delays.
Beyond interconnection delays, the grid itself is aging; 70% of U.S. transmission lines over 25 years old (US Senate). A significant portion of the U.S. electric grid was built in the 1960s and 1970s, while some operating transmission lines are over a century old. This aging infrastructure increases operational and maintenance costs while limiting the grid’s ability to integrate new energy sources efficiently. At the same time, grid operators lack the tools to modernize their processes, whether in expanding transmission capacity, managing grid congestion, or streamlining interconnection studies.
These systemic challenges elevate risk at every stage of a renewable energy project’s lifecycle. Developers face early-stage uncertainty in interconnection and permitting, mid-stage capital constraints, and long-term operational challenges tied to evolving grid dynamics. The rise of battery storage and demand-response technologies has further increased grid complexity, requiring more sophisticated risk assessment tools for developers and investors. Together, delays create uncertainty and generate higher costs for developers (many projects withdraw after years of waiting, wasting efforts) - forming a bottleneck that prevents energy transition demand and supply from meeting efficiently in the market.
VoLo Earth’s History with Pearl Street
VoLo Earth’s history with Pearl Street can date back to Kareem Master’s degree in Renewable Energy Engineering and Grid Integration in 2014, where he uncovered the need to apply automation to grid interconnection. It was only a matter of time before transmission-level interconnection in the US would become a huge bottleneck. Kareem and David Bromberg, Pearl Street founder, even had early discussions around the grid interconnection problem in 2015 living in Palo Alto, both building Aurora Solar.
Fast forward to 2021 and David, Kareem, and their Co-Founders had launched Pearl Street. As Kareem brought the Company to the rest of the team, it became a very clear investment choice; VoLo Earth’s investment strategy favors technologies which bring a true step change in unit economics, solutions that unlock critical industry bottlenecks, and capital light service models. Pearl Street exemplifies each of these qualities.
VoLo Earth leading the seed round and Kareem joining the board was a natural progression, and Pearl Street’s amazing technology was quickly demonstrating real value in opening up the interconnection bottleneck. If you remember our September newsletter, Kareem even had the honor of officiating David’s wedding.
How Pearl Street is ‘Undoing the Queue’
Pearl Street brings automation to grid planning which allows grid planners to evaluate network impacts of new projects in days rather than months. To date, the Company has processed over 300 GW of generation in interconnection queues (with 100+ GW more in the pipeline) for its utility clients SPP and MISO.
Pearl Street spun out of Carnegie Melon with a software engine called SUGAR™ (Suite of Unified Grid Analyses with Renewables), which utilizes innovative circuit simulation techniques to model power grids with far greater speed and stability than traditional tools.
The Company’s flagship product focuses on automating interconnection studies. When Pearl Street first brought this product to SPP (manager of the electric grid and wholesale power market for the central United States), a dramatic collapse of timelines occurred immediately: what once took months of manual engineering was achievable in a single day. This success led to a surge of utility and investor interest. Soon, Pearl Street signed another large ISO (Independent System Operators) agreement with MISO, one of the world’s largest grid and real time energy market operators.
The impacts of Pearl Street on these businesses are massive; SUGAR can reduce certain engineering analysis times by up to 200× compared to standard load flow programs or manual calculations. In terms of modeling factors like intermittency, SUGAR is designed to rapidly solve (or converge) nonlinear power flow equations and optimization problems that previously took brute-force effort. For instance, engineers can ask “What if we add 5 GW of wind in West Texas and 3 GW of storage in Chicago and a hurricane knocks out two transmission lines?”
Pearl Street also launched a developer-facing product called Interconnect, which allows developers to use ISO-level cluster study data to assess project interconnection risk. This saves developers significant time and money.
The platform can even move beyond modeling projects in the queue to even discovering grid connection solutions that conventional methods miss, potentially avoiding unnecessary infrastructure upgrades.
Building new transmission is slow, expensive, and very challenging (think property and rights of way that need to be obtained). Optimizing existing infrastructure, and allowing for interconnection of new clean energy generators, solves both energy supply and grid utilization problems at once. It allows for faster adoption of clean energy, storage, and new demand like highway fast chargers for EVs and data centers for AI.
Looking Forward
Pearl Street has become a national leader in grid modernization - the strategic acquisition by Enverus will only cement and accelerate this role.
This national leadership was recently recognized by FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which recently opined on interconnection automation to ISOs and RTOs (that’s Independent System Operators and Regional Transmission Operators in grid speak) with this letter from Commissioner Rosner. In the 3rd paragraph, he specifically highlights the results of Pearl Street and MISO’s implementation of SUGAR, stating that “One application reproduced the manual study of a large interconnection cluster - which took nearly two years to complete - in just 10 days and arrived at largely similar results.”
Meanwhile, as interconnection challenges mount, data and analytics are becoming essential to navigating grid constraints and energy market dynamics. Enverus, a leading provider of energy data and insights, helps stakeholders - including developers, investors, and utilities - understand market trends, congestion risks, and the financial viability of projects. By leveraging Enverus' intelligence alongside automation tools like Pearl Street, the industry can make smarter, faster decisions in an increasingly complex grid environment.
Pearl Street is at the forefront of the nation’s energy future, unlocking and orchestrating the terawatts of renewable energy projects needed to power the country. Already, the Company’s impact illuminates how software can drive systemic change - reducing uncertainty, expanding grid capacity, and cutting years off interconnection timelines to turn theoretical transition pathways into tangible reality.
We are humbled to have had the opportunity to provide Pearl Street with the catalytic capital and critical early mentorship to help the Company arrive at this milestone. With 300+ GW processed to date, the impact is already significant. This will only expand as Pearl Street gains access to Enverus’ resources and expands its partnerships with some of the country’s largest ISO. We will remain proud to witness Pearl Street transform the national grid and accelerate the energy transition.