Grid operator SPP partners with Hitachi to speed interconnection studies

The partnership aims to reduce interconnection study times by 80%, to address SPP’s portion of a national bottleneck of 2,500 GW of solar, wind and storage projects awaiting interconnection.

June 9, 2025 William Driscoll

Image: ImagePerson, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Central U.S. grid operator Southwest Power Pool and Tokyo-based Hitachi have announced they will develop an AI-based solution that they said will reduce generator interconnection analysis times by 80%, while informing “faster, higher-quality decision-making by generation interconnection customers.”

SPP President and CEO Lanny Nickell said “There are a lot of would-be power producers out there waiting to connect to the grid, but yesterday’s systems and technology haven’t been sufficient to enable us to bring incremental capacity online fast enough. It’s time to fix that.”

The project will “markedly improve” SPP’s ability to facilitate the addition of generating capacity “to keep pace with increasing demand for electricity,” the two organizations said in a statement.

Interconnection study delays nationwide have contributed to a bottleneck of about 2500 GW of solar, wind and hybrid projects waiting in the interconnection queues of U.S. grid operators and utilities.

The “long wait times” for projects awaiting interconnection, the statement said, “are due to exhaustive, time-consuming analysis and simulation studies required.”

To speed the study process, the partners said they will develop an industrial AI system with advanced proprietary AI algorithms, built on Nvidia computing, networking and AI software.

Frank Antonysamy, chief growth officer with Hitachi Digital, said real-time data access is needed to create “truly realistic scenarios caused by new generator introductions,” and that the AI solution being developed will provide such real-time data, among other advantages, allowing SPP to make “significantly quicker, better-informed decisions.”

SPP and Hitachi aim to achieve early improvements by this winter. Ultimately, “dynamic AI-driven technologies” will be applied to various study areas, such as process automation, predictive analysis, and communications systems integration.

SPP said it is also reworking its transmission planning processes to align with current and future industry needs, including analysis and deployment of additional grid-enhancing technologies.

Progress elsewhere

FERC Commissioner David Rosner said in a March letter to regional grid operators that an automation solution used by midcontinent grid operator MISO “reproduced the manual study of a large interconnection cluster—which took nearly two years to complete—in just 10 days, arriving at largely similar results.”

MISO has worked with Pearl Street Technologies to implement that firm’s interconnection automation platform, known as SUGAR.

Rosner added that he hoped to discuss with regional grid operators “your experience with interconnection automation technologies to date, the prospects for further deploying them going forward, and, most importantly, how the Commission can support such innovation.”

The nation’s largest grid operator PJM announced in April that it is working with grid consultancy Tapestry to streamline its interconnection application process, which is the first step to enable new generators to connect to the transmission grid.

SPP is a regional transmission organization serving member utilities in 14 states. Hitachi is a global firm with 280,000 employees.

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