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How much financial risk should a developer accept on a project before they actually know what the network upgrade costs will look like? That question sits at the center of nearly every interconnection decision — and it's what Nira's Jenny Erwin (Senior Director, Customer Engagement) and Doral's Shawn Welch (VP, Interconnection & Transmission) addressed in their joint presentation at ESIG's i2X STITCH Meeting 4: Automation and Data Harmonization.

The i2X STITCH initiative — facilitated by Berkeley Lab in collaboration with ESIG and Elevate Energy Consulting as part of the DOE's Interconnection Innovation e-Xchange — brings together industry stakeholders to explore interconnection study practices across U.S. regions and identify opportunities for harmonization. This session focused specifically on how automation is reshaping study workflows and decision-making throughout the interconnection process.

Why This Matters: The Decision Window Problem

Developers typically have a narrow window to make go/no-go calls and commit financial security payments on projects still working through the interconnection queue. Historically, that decision has relied on manual studies that can only cover a handful of scenarios before the deadline. Automation changes the math: instead of evaluating 1-2 scenarios, teams can run dozens of sensitivity studies across a portfolio of queue positions before a decision point closes.

The Takeaway

As Doral and Nira's presentation put it: without automation, some of these projects would have been dropped — projects that ultimately reached commercial operation because teams had the tooling to forecast outcomes and make informed decisions under time pressure, not just react after the fact.