What You Can Get vs. What You Might Need

In the electrified economy, power is what’s measured in megawatts, but what the grid can actually deliver, safely and consistently, at any given moment we call might. The distinction is more than semantics - it is a window into how the grid runs now (and what delays it) as well as how it can be improved.

Historically, we—the public—granted utilities the exclusive franchise to deliver us affordable and constantly available power. These two goals are often in tension: the more reliable we demand the grid to be, the more expensive it becomes. But we accepted that tradeoff, because there was no practical alternative. That’s changing.

With storage costs falling and technologies proliferating, the old expectation of continuous, on-demand supply is being supplanted with a new model: take delivery ahead of time, and use stored power along with what the utility can deliver on demand. This new approach gets the most out of the grid and often can energize a site faster, because it works with the grid’s limitations, not against them.

This new approach has been adopted on both the load and generation interconnection systems, from Australia to the United Kingdom, and select utilities in the U.S. It was studied most recently in an excellent Department of Energy, Office of Electricity report here.

Section 1: Why Utilities Say “Not Yet”

Utility interconnection delays aren’t caused by policy, they’re the result of physical grid constraints.

A utility might decline or limit your service request because:

• A feeder is thermally constrained, adding load would overheat it.

• The voltage profile on the circuit would fall outside safe margins.

• A substation transformer is already at its limit.

• Adding your load would throw off the fault protection scheme.

When utilities say “no,” what they’re really saying is: “We can’t safely guarantee delivery of that much power at that location, right now.”

But often, they can deliver what you want most of the time. The problem becomes: how can I make up the shortfall?

Section 2: Flexible Load Interconnection – Using What the Grid Can Give

Flexible interconnections start from that exact premise: take what the utility can give, and fill in the rest.

Rather than waiting for a full interconnection to come through, a customer accepts a partial grid connection and combines it with intelligently controlled onsite assets, like batteries, solar, or backup generation.

For example:
A facility needs 3 MW to operate, but during summer evenings, the utility can only deliver 1 MW for two hours. With a 2 MW/ 4MWh battery system, the facility can still operate at full capacity by drawing down stored energy during those hours.

In this model, power doesn’t have to be continuous, as long as it’s predictable and storage becomes the tool that turns intermittent power into operational certainty.

What’s most important is that it all happens in a way the utility can rely on.

Section 3: Making It Safe- UL 3141 and the Role of Control

Utilities can’t support flexible models unless they’re confident that customers will stay within agreed limits.

That’s where UL 3141 comes in. It’s the safety standard for Power Control Systems (PCS)—the devices that coordinate site load, onsite generation, and grid import in real time, in a way that the utility can trust.

Critical Loop’s PCS is certified to this standard, enforcing the “not to exceed” limit at the grid connection point while dynamically dispatching batteries and managing loads. The result: grid confidence and site reliability, even under constrained interconnections.

We don’t just energize the site. We govern and protect its behavior.

Section 4: Critical Loop – From Delay to Deployment

Critical Loop unlocks a new kind of grid interaction:

• Take the capacity the utility has now.

• Make it useful immediately.

• Grow over time without stranded investments.

• We reduce time-to-power by months or years. We de-risk the project development cycle. And we allow customers to scale up over time, with confidence.

A New Social Contract for Power

The original utility bargain, affordable, always-on power, was the right model for a century. But now, we have new tools: batteries, smart controls, distributed generation.

With those tools, we don’t always need continuous delivery, we just need enough access to store what we need, and the ability to manage it ourselves.

Power is still valuable. But might, the ability to deliver under constraint, and the intelligence to manage it, is what defines the future of energy.