As battery storage demand accelerates and PJM's interconnection queue tightens, BESS developers need ways to evaluate points of interconnection at portfolio scale — without sacrificing the precision that makes filings stick.

In preparation for PJM New Cycle 1 — the most competitive interconnection cycle PJM has run to date — Charged used Nira's Prospecting tool to:

• Screen available capacity across PJM and ultimately identify a five-site BESS portfolio totaling 1.35 GW / 5.4 GWh

• Pull detailed interconnection information and shared network upgrade cost on high potential POIs

• Benchmark physical interconnection costs against nearby TC1 and TC2 projects

  
  

“Filing five BESS projects into PJM NC1 meant getting POI decisions right across the portfolio, and at this scale, the cost of guessing is real. Nira's platform gave me analysis I could trust, including visibility into the utility-side upgrades already baked into the results, which materially shaped how we thought about specific sites.” - Paul Reed, Founder & CEO

Filing five projects into a single competitive cycle compounds the cost of every POI decision. Running scenarios manually — or commissioning bespoke studies for each candidate site — is time-intensive and difficult to scale across a portfolio in motion.

That's where Nira comes in. Prospecting enables developers like Charged to evaluate points of interconnection at scale, surface shared upgrade exposure across a portfolio, and benchmark physical interconnection costs against comparable nearby projects in prior cycles — all in a fraction of the time a manual workflow requires.

Beyond the platform itself, Charged had access to Nira's team of transmission planning engineers and interconnection experts — available to answer technical questions about results and help interpret what the analysis was showing across specific points of interconnection. On one of Charged's five sites, that combination of platform analysis and expert clarification informed which substation the project ultimately filed at.

"I've been using Nira Energy's tools since the early days of the company, and I have faith in the products they've built. Nira has industry-defining software and screening tools to understand capacity.” Paul Reed, Founder & CEO

Nira helps Charged move faster as it builds out the battery storage capacity PJM's grid increasingly depends on.