They launched the platform last year in Ameren Illinois’ service territory, and it is now available to developers in the service areas of more than 20 investor-owned utilities across eight states, including ConEd in New York, Xcel in Minnesota, and Potomac Edison in Maryland, according to MeanderX Founder’s Associate Sandra Hu. The platform is also available for parts of New Jersey, Delaware, and Washington, D.C.
MeanderX uses AI to scrape and analyze data from utilities that is in theory publicly available, but is difficult to access without complicated coding.
“Pre-AI, having to navigate and automatically track the web of hosting-capacity and interconnection-queue datasets available to developers from different utilities would have been incredibly time-consuming and complex,” Huppertz said. “AI has allowed us to centralize and automatically update this data.”
Hu explained that for solar developers, there is normally “very little visibility into what’s actually happening ahead of them” in the queue. “We provide live tracking of queue movements — which projects have dropped out, which have advanced to construction, where disputes are clustering.”
For example, community solar developers in Illinois can quickly see on MeanderX that the area on the south edge of Quincy, near the Mississippi River, has a relatively open queue. The area around the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, by contrast, is a virtual traffic jam.
