[mbishop]

This absolutely is a software problem.

Many utilities are interested in enrolling their customers in programs that would allow software to control the energy demands their customers put on the grid.

For instance, if you are a high-energy consuming factory, you may have a fixed amount of energy that you need to use each day, but have some flexibility as to exactly what time of day it is used.

There are companies right now writing software that takes into consideration all the constraints around the electrical usage of the various customers of a utility, and then vary the customer’s electrical usage in real time as the energy demand/production fluctuates on the grid.

Think of it this way. You can either put a battery on the grid to supply energy when the grid needs it OR, you can ask customers to stop using as much energy at that moment. Either way, the supply meets demand.

For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_power_plant

[mmt]

Although the problem you described can be solved with software, is it really "high growth"?

Put another way, can this grid flexibility problem be solved purely with a (currently popular in tech, especially among startups, as the GP alluded) cloud-based SaaS offering?

Or will it require some significant non-software portions to the solutions, such as co-locating hardware and/or high-reliability low-latency networking?

[mmt]

I realized my (own) sibling comment sounded like a bunch of rhetorical questions, since they were asked from the standpoint of my skepticism/suspicion based on what I read.

However, they actually are questions, and I'd appreciate knowing the answers (or best approximations) from an insider.

The wikipedia doesn't provide much insight into the technical underpinnings to draw any conclusions.

Perhaps there's something of an answer to the OC's general question, just in this inscrutability: the details are so foreign/unique but so important that software/computer people would have no intuition on how or where their skills would fit.

[jacquesm]

You seem to have missed the word 'exclusively'. Obviously software is an (important) part of a solution but it will need a lot of hardware and hardware knowledge in order to be able to be solved well. Your typical high-growth hacker wantrepreneur wouldn't touch a project like that with a 10' pole.