Scaling distributed energy systems with software

The Mission

(we chose to accept it)

Enbala, a virtual power plant and distributed energy resource management platform, has a real-time energy-balancing platform called Concerto.

The Concerto platform continuously shifts and adjusts flexibly across a vast network of electrical grid assets and responds instantly through continuous feedback loops on massive amounts of data.

The tech engine manages challenges of intermittency, variability and unpredictability. That gets pretty complicated, pretty quickly.

Enbala needed help scaling their Concerto platform into a distributed, well-tested, fault-tolerant umbrella application, so they could process gigabytes of data per second with multiple computations factored from thousands of assets on the electrical grid.

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The Fix

Our consultants embedded with the team to pair on rapidly advancing features, using Elixir and Elm.

We collaborated with Enbala’s developer team to refactor, improve and expand capabilities on Concerto so they could deliver more of what their customers want in a maintainable way.

In the process, we uncovered efficiencies and continuously improved the system with an eye towards reliability and resiliency:

Rapidly released features in a complex codebase—gigabytes per month of persisted telemetry data and just-in-time performance calculations across thousands of assets simultaneously

Refactored the system to make performance more observable, highly available and multi-node distributed with smarter data structures

Developed a framework for reusable, extensible and customizable rich data visualizations while also reducing rework costs

Automated regression testing and end-to-end testing with Cypress for speed and ease of maintenance

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Software is about the humans, too. So along the way, we also worked to help the team, too:

Encouraged a culture of more productive processes and trust across better-balanced teams

Helped product owners increase predictability with improved technical knowledge to aid smarter decision making and prioritization

Boosted team growth and mentored developers on Elm, Elixir, Javascript and TDD

Led by example with healthy communication strategies to identify process problems, remove blockers and propose solutions

Repurposed existing meetings for open forum technical discussions to make better use of time and to independently run with things

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CONSULTANTS

Tech & Techniques

Elixir/Phoenix
Erlang
Elm
C
Cypress/JS
Absinthe/GraphQL
PostgreSQL
Ruby
AWS
DataDog APM

The Results

Enbala is leading the way in defining cleaner, more sustainable power grids, and Test Double was a critical partner in making that happen.

We solved complex technical challenges on the front and back end. We also helped build a great team with pairing, product coaching and process improvement.

Most importantly, Test Double consultants helped Enbala scale in critical ways.

As a result, Enbala was able to build a market leadership position and was successfully acquired by Generac Power System to have an even greater impact.

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