Planetary Solutions in Clean Energy Summer Fellow Spotlight: Hiromi Kondo, Grid Status

The Planetary Solutions in Clean Energy (PSiCE) Fellowship offered by the Yale Center for Business and the Environment (CBEY) provides summer research and internship opportunities for students interested in pursuing a career in the clean energy space. This year, as part of its fifth cohort, CBEY matched 11 undergraduate and graduate students with clean energy organizations in the nonprofit, startup, and private sectors. This summer series highlights PSiCE Fellows to learn about their motivation and experience in the program 

The Forum had the pleasure of speaking with Hiromi Kondo, a Master of Environmental Management candidate at the Yale School of the Environment. Hiromi is a summer fellow at Grid Status working to make energy markets data more meaningful and understandable.

Written by Jenny Liu (Yale College '26)

To work in the clean energy industry is to work with very dense data. This is especially true when it comes to the US Electric Grid, where real-time, comprehensive data is needed to monitor price signals across different energy markets with accuracy. For PSiCE Fellow Hiromi Kondo MEM’27, her work at Grid Status helps make that data more centralized, accessible and meaningful to different stakeholders. 

That said, Hiromi’s background is more ecologically focused. She worked seasonally as a field technician, conducted research on soil moisture, and also worked in the ski industry. Her pivot to energy emerged both as a personal interest to do work that affected people more directly and after her role as Business Manager at CLEER, a clean energy nonprofit, in the Western Slope in Colorado. 

Now, at the Yale School of the Environment (YSE), she concentrates in energy and is hoping to strengthen her skillset: “I was looking to get more technical, foundational knowledge and build out more of my quantitative skills, as well as my qualitative.” Working at Grid Status allows Hiromi to apply the quantitative skills and knowledge she has accumulated so far at YSE. 

Additionally, her work allows her to scale up her focus: “I was working regionally within a state—Colorado is a fairly large state depending on which state you're considering in the US—but I wanted to do something on a slightly broader scale. The US wholesale market is definitely [on] a broader scale! But… with it being markets, it's still kind of regional in the sense of multiple states, which is kind of the exact scale I was interested in looking at. So that box was really ticked for me—getting to think about things at a higher level on the system and how it is all interconnected.”

Wholesale, bulk electricity sales occur between generators or electric power providers (known as sellers) and utility companies (known as buyers). These sales happen in different organized, geographically distinct markets in the country such as ISO-NE, NYISO, PJM, Southeast, and ERCOT. As a B2B SaaS (Business to Business, Software as a Service) startup provider, Grid Status focuses on these US wholesale electricity markets, helping diverse stakeholders understand how best to leverage this data. 

As an intern on the Markets team, Hiromi’s work involves generating analysis across the different U.S. energy markets. Specifically, she is working on a portion of Grid Status’s product called Insights, where they post short text with images and charts to highlight price changes and fluctuations that may be a result of factors such as a lack of energy resources or congestion. “For example, if you can expect a ton of load and the system’s going to be really stressed, or resources aren’t following the forecast, that will also manipulate price,” she says. “I'm trying to contribute to the insights, finding something interesting, tracking it down, figuring out how to communicate it through data visualization and also some associated text.” 

She highlighted two other projects she has underway: “On the other hand, I am working on a longer-form blog that I'll finish by the end of summer, which right now is focusing on geothermal. 

Then I also have a quantitative project going on right now—a technical project—where I just drafted a new tab to add to one of the pages on the site that is communicating the data of one of ISO New England's morning reports: what different charts could be useful, how the data should be prioritized on the page based on what people are going to care about, and also thinking about what other data can be brought in to help contextualize it and provide more meaning in addition to what the morning report just has written in it.” 

She appreciates how her projects have opened her eyes to a new world of work: “[This level of] nuance is very valuable to a niche group of people [like] energy traders. That whole world is kind of something I didn't really think about that much, maybe at all, before this.” 

When asked what key metric could be most useful as someone’s entry point into US energy markets, she emphasized the significance of fuel mix. Fuel mix is the specific combination of primary energy sources that a region uses to generate electricity and power. “You can look for changes there to see what could be driving changes in price, which then leads you to the local marginal price—the cost for one more unit of energy—which is composed of a few different components.” 

“There's the energy component, which is consistent across an ISO/RTO, and then there's congestion and loss.” The energy component refers to the wholesale cost of the raw electricity itself.

“Loss is generally a smaller component that's not as influential in terms of magnitude.” Loss refers to the loss of energy that happens when electricity travels over power lines and has some energy naturally wasted due to the friction of the wires (Veeder-Root, 2019). It can cost more to serve a customer that is far away. But it is a small component because these inefficiencies are minor and often accounted for.

“Congestion can definitely cause the inconsistencies across a region that are signaling how power should move and where they want it, driving prices.” Congestion happens when the cheapest power available cannot physically get to where the demand is as a result of the physical limits of power lines or transformers (NRG Editorial Voices, 2025). Because of the “traffic jam,” the price of electricity spikes to account for the demand. 

The highlighted resource in the image below is Grid Status’s Maps Tool, which provides a color gradient within and across markets to show the shift in price. That provides users with an idea of where congestion is or where energy is needed. 

A screenshot of Grid Status’s PJM dashboard. On the righthand side, one can see the map of the different (and generally on the more expensive end) prices. 

Through her work, Hiromi recognizes the unique niche Grid Status is trying to fill in the market. This involves evaluating product development opportunities and strategically deciding which features to monetize: “A lot of the other existing products and existing companies have become kind of antiquated. Their platform isn't that good; maybe it has bugs, runs really slowly, or is just not modernized and nice to look at. 

“In addition, [these other products are] not telling the story as well as you could [or] contextualizing the data in a way that's as useful. And that's really what Grid Status is trying to target: doing all of those things better, and also having really clear transparency about where all the data is coming from. They're trying to become the go-to place for this information, so they're trying to communicate it best, if not better than everyone else, [and] also provide a really high-quality product.” 

In creating that high-quality product comes a lot of questioning and trial-and-error. Hiromi notices that this makes for a fast-paced, open, and collaborative work environment: “The organization I was working at before was a small nonprofit of similar size…” (at the time of writing, Grid Status has a small and mighty team of 16, including Hiromi) “…but had been around the block for a minute. And that is very different from working at a startup that's only been around for a few years that is also in the tech realm. 

“So I've found it very refreshing to be working with more people who are closer in age to me, and who have more tech literacy, and who are constantly talking about their processes. It’s very nice to see them trying out new softwares. There's a lot of honest and direct conversations where we’re like, ‘How could we just be doing this better?’” 

It would be difficult to have a conversation about work without also questioning how AI has played into that work. And for Hiromi, how Grid Status embraces AI (or lack thereof) aligns with her own ethos: “At Grid Status, I think I pretty much agree with their approach. It's using AI as a starting point, potentially, right? You can vibe-code something, and that's the starting point. And then you [can] hand it off to the engineering team, and they're going to go through and review it and make sure that it's actually sound, not just whatever [the LLM] spit out. 

“In terms of the writing, there's a pretty good stance on not having AI do any of the writing. Maybe use it for research, but you’re still going through and fact-checking everything and finding your own sources and verifying these sources that are getting pointed to. It’s only generated by the humans on the team. I think that there's a pretty good pulse on the amount of distrust.” 

Looking ahead, Hiromi appreciates how Grid Status has opened her eyes to a new field of work while creating a supportive environment to do such work. There’s a culture of working through problems while also accepting that one will not know everything. “I'm really enjoying the market scale. It doesn't necessarily need to be all of [the markets], but I do like this broader-scale thinking. The grid was also kind of this black box before I came to YSE, and I didn't really understand what was going on there. 

“[The people at Grid Status] are very adamant about the fact that when it comes to this, you simply will not know everything ever. So, you'll always just be learning. I always think that's a good perspective to have around, rather than people who think that they do know everything when they likely don't.” 

Sources: 

AppDirect. (2026). What is B2B SaaS? AppDirect. https://www.appdirect.com/resources/glossary/b2b-saas. 

NRG Editorial Voices. (2025, April 22). Understanding Grid Congestion & Transmission Constraints: Market Impediment or Opportunity? NRG Insights. https://www.nrg.com/insights/energy-education/transmission-congestion---constraints.html.

Veeder-Root. (2019, June 8). Detecting and Reducing Loss in Your Fueling System. Veeder-Root Blog. https://www.veeder.com/us/blog/detecting-and-reducing-loss-your-fueling-system