01 — Grid storage — 2025
Ferrite
for Loam Energy
Loam operates twelve utility-scale storage sites across the Central Valley. Their operators were reading state-of-charge off four separate vendor portals and a spreadsheet. We built one console that reconciles all of it and tells a tired person what to do next.
- 2.4s
- 11 → 1
- 38%
01
The survey
We spent the first eleven days in the Tracy control room, not writing code. Operators work twelve-hour shifts, and the interesting failures happen in hour ten — when someone reads a state-of-charge figure that is four minutes stale and dispatches against it.
The existing portals were not badly built. They were built for commissioning engineers who visit a site twice a year, then handed to people who live in them. Every screen optimized for completeness. None optimized for glance.
02
What we changed
Ferrite has one primary view: a rack-level heat strip across all twelve sites, sorted by how much attention each deserves rather than alphabetically. Freshness is drawn, not stated — cells fade toward the paper ground as their telemetry ages, so stale data looks stale.
The dispatch panel refuses to submit against readings older than ninety seconds. It was the most contentious decision in the engagement and the one Loam cites most often.
03
Instrumentation
We shipped with a telemetry pipeline that records every operator hesitation — hover-without-click, panel opened and abandoned, dispatch drafted and cleared. Six weeks of that data reshaped the alarm hierarchy more than any interview did.
“The first version we liked was the fourth version. The first version the operators liked was the sixth.”
Tidewater
Flood models for people who are not modelers, on a phone, offline.