Accelerating “The Era of Governed AI Interconnection and Grid Planning”
GridUnity’s Intelligence Lab is the industry’s new go-to ecosystem for community-driven collaboration, rapid development, and breakthrough innovation—built for the urgency of now.
Electricity demand is compressing decades of growth into years. The grid can't wait.
Electricity demand is rising faster and more sharply than at any point in modern grid history. Large-scale data centers and AI workloads, electrification, advanced manufacturing, and digital infrastructure are driving demand that, in many regions, compresses decades of historical growth into just a few years. At the same time, rapid advances in generation, transmission, storage, and digital technologies are reshaping what is possible, while increasing the complexity of the grid.
This acceleration in demand and technology has created a new and urgent requirement for the grid to deliver power faster, with greater certainty, and at unprecedented scale. Yet today, the industry’s path to power is increasingly unable to keep up.
Interconnection queues are growing longer and more congested. Grid planning is not optimized for the new demands of the grid. New capacity timelines stretch into years while demand materializes in months. Projects stall not because the need isn’t clear, or the technology doesn’t exist, but because the system designed to evaluate, coordinate, and deliver grid connections cannot move at the speed the next phase of grid evolution demands.
Long interconnection queues and inefficient grid planning have become the most visible bottlenecks in the system. The assumption has long been that the industry could meet growing demand and complexity by adding more data, more studies, and more expertise. In reality, the industry already has all three—in abundance.
Progress is not constrained by a lack of data, expertise, or intent—it’s constrained by an intelligence gap.
The Intelligence Gap
Accelerated interconnection and optimized grid planning are necessary to meet growing demand, and rely on massive volumes of data distributed across systems, organizations, and jurisdictions. While each dataset may be valid on its own, today’s grid planning decision-makers are left to manually reconcile inputs, assumptions, timelines, and tradeoffs. This contributes to a growing intelligence gap.
As demand for grid upgrades accelerates and complexity increases, traditional approaches no longer scale. Without innovation, interconnection queues will remain jammed, time-to-power will continue to lag, and the grid’s ability to respond to growth will fall further behind. The industry needs a new way to operate: one that augments human expertise with trusted intelligence, reduces ambiguity, tests scenarios faster, and enables grid leaders to accelerate interconnection and optimize planning by compressing decision-making.
GridUnity sees the challenge of closing this intelligence gap as the industry’s greatest opportunity. With a proven foundation of trusted grid data, supported by a five-year Department of Energy (DOE) backed investment to accelerate and modernize the grid interconnection process, GridUnity is launching the GridUnity Intelligence Lab to provide the path forward.
The GridUnity Intelligence Lab is where that future is being built.
Introducing The GridUnity Intelligence Lab
The GridUnity Intelligence Lab is GridUnity’s customer co-creation ecosystem for accelerating innovation across the industry—spanning workflow modernization, data model advances, interoperability, analytics, automation, and AI capabilities.
GridUnity Intelligence Lab is not a standalone product. It is a structured, customer-driven innovation ecosystem designed to explore, test, collaborate and validate new capabilities that extend the value of GridUnity’s interconnection and grid planning platform.
By targeting industry bottlenecks, GridUnity Intelligence Lab enables customers to test how expert AI agents can be applied to break down complexity and realize time-steps, all while grounded in operational reality, implementation feasibility, and measurable outcomes.
The GridUnity Intelligence Lab is the Pipeline for Safe, Fast Innovation
GridUnity Intelligence Lab is the industry innovation sandbox. Through GridUnity Intelligence Lab, GridUnity customers can build, test, collaborate, and scale new AI agents and high-impact use cases on real utility data—safely, quickly, and in a controlled environment.
This enables customers to move beyond generic experimentation to practical innovation that is:
- Grounded in real business cases
- Aligned with governance and access controls
- Validated against measurable operational outcomes
Why Participate?
Customers who engage with GridUnity Intelligence Lab gain early access to emerging industry innovations and actively shape how advanced AI capabilities are applied to real grid challenges. Participation enables organizations to:
- Influence future GridUnity capabilities based on operational needs and stakeholder realities
- Pilot new innovations safely with clear scope, governance, and outcome measurement
- Accelerate internal learning around AI-enabled and automation-enabled decision-making
- Demonstrate leadership in improving infrastructure delivery, transparency, and grid resilience
- Reduce risk by validating what works before scaling across the organization
- Empower the workforce of the future to team with agents to parse complex problems and make informed decisions
Grid-native Intelligence for Trusted Answers
As part of GridUnity’s commitment to industry innovation, GridUnity Intelligence Lab is accelerating development of GALE AI (Grid Analytics Learning Engine) —GridUnity’s grid-native AI, built on a master data model of the physical grid to deliver trusted, expert-level answers.
GALE AI is designed for operational credibility:
- Pre-trained on grid standards and mandates, then continuously tuned to each utility’s grid model and operating practices
- Persona-based AI agents provide real-time, role-based assistance using only the most current data—and only what each user is allowed to access
- GALE runs on foundational interconnection and planning lifecycle data, captured and curated through GridInterConnect and GridSync implementations that span across all U.S. regions
This approach is built to close the gap between “analysis” and “decision,” with answers traceable to the underlying data and aligned with how stakeholder organizations actually operate.
Advancing the Grid—Together
The pace of change facing the grid demands more than incremental improvement. It requires new ways of working—grounded in verified data, augmented by intelligence, and validated in practice.
The GridUnity Intelligence Lab exists to close the intelligence gap by working side by side with customers—accelerating innovation that improves how grid decisions are made, how interconnection moves faster, and how infrastructure delivery becomes more predictable and resilient.