A microgrid is only as good as its brain. Insight™ is the brain.
The Good Grid plans, models and runs behind-the-meter microgrids with Insight™ Digital Twin: a live physics model of your site that knows what your solar, storage and loads should be doing, sees the moment they don't, and puts a price on the difference.
One site, four moments, seen through the twin
A normal day
What a digital twin is, and what ours does
A digital twin is a working model of a physical system that runs alongside it. The idea grew up in aerospace and manufacturing, where engineers needed to test, predict and train on a copy before touching the real thing.
Insight™ Digital Twin applies that to energy. For every asset on your site it keeps a physics-informed model that recalculates, in real time, what the asset should be producing from live sunlight, temperature and equipment state. Then it compares that to what the asset is actually producing.
Most monitoring tools tell you a system is running. The twin tells you whether it is running as well as it should, why not, and what the shortfall is costing you.
Model
Build a live model of every panel string, inverter, battery and load from design data and site conditions.
Compare
Measure actual performance against the model continuously, not against last year's average.
Explain
Turn every gap into kilowatt-hours and, with your tariff or PPA rate, into dollars.
Act
Route a specific task to the right technician, and adjust how the battery and loads run.
What Insight™ does today, and what's next
We would rather tell you exactly what ships now than promise a roadmap.
Predicted versus actual, continuously Live
A real-time baseline for each inverter, site and portfolio, built from live irradiance, temperature and equipment state.
Shortfall in kWh and dollars Live
Every deviation expressed as lost energy per inverter, per site and per portfolio, and as revenue impact when a tariff or PPA rate is provided.
Anomaly detection and service routing Live
A configurable rules engine flags underperformance and sends alerts with their impact attached, so a technician arrives with a task, not a fault code.
Alarms and dashboards without code Live
Multi-level alarms with escalation, and drag-and-drop dashboards for single sites or whole fleets.
AI fault diagnostics In development
Classification that tells soiling from shading, clipping, string degradation and tracker faults, each with a confidence score and a recommended action.
Portfolio intelligence In development
Every site ranked by recovery opportunity, contract compliance risk and maintenance priority in one view.
Model it before you build it
The twin earns its keep before a single panel goes up. A 48,000 square foot indoor growing facility in California had a 2.8 MW microgrid designed using standard tools and conservative over-design.
Modeled in the twin, with the building's lighting, cooling, weather and growing conditions linked, the real load came into focus. The right-sized system was about 1.3 MW, and changing the lighting brought it to about 1.0 MW. The analysis took one week.
The result: about $5.3 million, roughly 60%, off the buildout, and an estimated $120,000 a year less in operating cost.
The hardware the twin runs: behind-the-meter microgrids
The U.S. Department of Energy describes a microgrid as a group of connected loads and energy resources inside a clear electrical boundary that acts as one controllable unit toward the grid. It can stay connected, or disconnect and run on its own, which is called islanding.
Behind the meter means that boundary sits on the customer's side of the utility meter, on property you own or lease. The meter is where your bill is measured, so everything you produce, store and shift on your side changes what you pay.
Generation
Usually solar. Some sites add natural gas generation, fuel cells or wind so they can run longer without the sun.
Storage
Batteries hold energy for the evening, for the afternoon peak and for outages. They make solar useful after dark.
Intelligence: Insight™
The twin and the controls that act on it. It balances supply and demand, decides when the battery charges or discharges, and opens the switch to the grid when it has to.
The connection point
The switchgear where your site meets the utility. It lets the microgrid separate cleanly in an outage and reconnect safely afterward.
Where the money is
A well-run microgrid pays on three lines: outages you no longer suffer, demand charges you no longer pay, and energy your equipment should have produced but didn't. The third is the one most owners never see.
The yearly cost of outages
Berkeley Lab estimates sustained power interruptions cost U.S. customers about $44 billion a year. About 70% falls on commercial customers and 27% on industrial ones.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 2018 (2015 dollars)
Businesses paying steep demand charges
A demand charge bills your single highest burst of usage in the month. NREL found nearly 5 million U.S. commercial customers can be on tariffs with demand charges above $15 per kW. Forecasting the peak and covering it from the battery cuts that line.
NREL and Clean Energy Group, 2017
Energy lost to inverter downtime alone
Across 250 U.S. solar systems, NREL found inverter availability cost about 2.3% of energy on average, and startup issues like partial string outages cost another 5% in the first year. Problems like these rarely trip an alarm. A twin that knows what each inverter should produce finds them.
NREL, PV Fleet Performance Data Initiative, 2021
Critical loads stay on
When the grid fails, the microgrid disconnects and keeps serving what matters most: refrigeration, data, safety systems. DOE calls this ability to separate and run on its own the primary resilience benefit of a microgrid.
U.S. Department of Energy, Grid Deployment Office, 2024
What it costs
An NREL study found U.S. microgrids cost an average of $2 million to $5 million per megawatt to develop, about three quarters of it equipment and installation. Those are 2018 figures and every site differs. That spread is exactly why we model first: the cheapest megawatt is the one you discover you don't need.
What to weigh honestly
- Upfront capital can be significant, though financing and energy-as-a-service structures can spread it over time.
- A microgrid is a complex power system that needs skilled operation for its whole life. That is the job Insight™ is built for.
- Controls and communications must be secured. Insight™ is designed on a zero-trust security model.
- Sometimes a smaller step, like a battery for demand charges or monitoring an existing solar system, is the better answer.
Insight™ at every stage of the project
The same model follows your site from the first spreadsheet to its twentieth year of operation, so nothing learned along the way gets lost.
Insight™ Energy Assessment
What your site should do, modeled against physics-validated field data before anything is built or bought. Right-size the system and see the return with real numbers.
Insight™ Digital Twin
The live physics model of every asset: real-time data, validation against what each piece should produce, and a price on every deviation.
Insight™ Energy Operating System
Orchestration and control across solar, storage, facility systems and portfolio-scale loads, from peak shaving to islanding.
Assessment
Model loads, rates and site in the twin. Decide go or no-go on real numbers.
Agreement
Settle ownership and financing: purchase, lease or energy as a service.
Design and planning
Engineered drawings, permits and a utility interconnection plan, checked against the model.
Build and start-up
Install, commission and test islanding. The twin goes live with the system.
Operate and maintain
The twin watches every asset, the operating system dispatches it, and service follows the data.
Is your site a good fit?
The strongest candidates share one or more of these traits.
An outage is expensive
Cold storage, grocery, healthcare, data rooms, manufacturing lines: anywhere an hour without power costs more than the power itself.
Your bill has a demand charge
Short spikes from HVAC, compressors, EV chargers or production equipment set a high monthly peak that forecasting and storage can flatten.
You already own solar
If you have panels or batteries today, the twin can show what they should be producing and what they actually are, before you add anything.
Can Insight™ work with equipment we already have?
Insight™ is built to bring solar, storage and microgrid equipment from different makers into one view. Exactly what connects at your site, and how, is confirmed during the assessment.
Is this just a monitoring dashboard?
No. A dashboard shows what happened. The twin calculates what should have happened, measures the gap, explains it in kilowatt-hours and dollars, and drives what happens next.
Do I have to leave the utility?
No. Most behind-the-meter microgrids stay connected every day and only island during an outage or a planned event. You keep utility service and add your own resources on top.
Who owns and runs it?
That depends on the agreement. Some owners buy outright. Others choose energy as a service, where a provider finances, owns and operates the system and the site pays for the energy and resilience it receives.
How long does a project take?
It varies with size, permitting and the utility's interconnection process. Modeling early and talking with the utility early are the two best ways to avoid delays.
See what your site should be doing
An Insight™ Energy Assessment models your loads, rates and roof space before anything is built or bought, so you can decide with real numbers. Already have solar? Start by finding out what it's leaving on the table.