Gridlock Labs

Inspiration

Power companies plan their construction projects years ahead, but neighboring utilities in different states rarely know what the other is building nearby. That leads to duplicated crews, equipment and costs, which is serious enough that federal regulators issued a rule about it in 2024. The Sperry Tech GridLock challenge asked us to help close that gap, and we wanted to build something a utility planner could actually use.

What it does

Gridlock compares the future construction plans of Dominion Energy South Carolina and Georgia Power on one interactive map. It flags projects that are close to each other or scheduled around the same time, so planners can see where working together makes sense. It also estimates how much money each coordination opportunity could save, which puts a dollar figure on why these overlaps matter.

How we built it

We gathered the utilities' public project plans, put every project on a map, and stored everything in a cloud database. On top of that we built a web dashboard where you can search projects, explore overlaps, and see the estimated savings.

Challenges we ran into

Public utility plans aren't made for maps. Most projects list only a name or a substation, not a location, so we spent a lot of time working out where each one actually is and checking the uncertain ones by hand. Cost data was also incomplete, because some of the utilities' costs are redacted, so we had to estimate them carefully from the numbers that were public.

What we learned

We learned a lot about how the power grid gets planned, and how much of a project's value comes from cleaning and verifying messy real-world data. We also learned how to split a big build across a team of four under hackathon time pressure.

Built With

• bun
• hono
• node.js
• psql
• react
• typescript