PingThings and Dominion Energy sign five-year grid data alliance
PingThings and Dominion Energy Virginia have announced a five-year Technology Acceleration Alliance that extends the California-based time-series data platform's role across the utility's generation, transmission and distribution operations. The partnership, which builds on seven years of prior collaboration, positions PredictiveGrid as Dominion Energy's primary grid data historian and commits the utility to serving as a reference customer for the wider industry.
The alliance comes against a backdrop of rapidly rising electricity demand in Dominion Energy's service territory, which the utility projects will more than double over the next two decades. A significant driver is Northern Virginia's data centre corridor, often described as the world's largest concentration of data centre capacity. PingThings has been recording high-frequency transmission data for that corridor since 2019, accumulating more than five petabytes of sensor data from transmission lines, substations and transformers. That archive is expected to more than double in volume under the new agreement.
Redefining the grid historian
Traditional operational data historians, which have anchored utility infrastructure for decades, typically downsample or discard high-frequency sensor readings when ingest rates exceed processing capacity. PingThings argues this creates irreversible data loss at precisely the moments most useful for post-event analysis and machine-learning model training.
PredictiveGrid is designed to ingest both high-frequency phasor measurement unit data and slower SCADA streams at full resolution, storing every measurement continuously rather than only when an alarm triggers. Dominion Energy says the approach has materially changed fault investigation outcomes: in seven of nine published engineering investigations, analysing the full-resolution archive revealed a different root cause than initially suspected, helping engineers avoid unnecessary or costly corrective action.
"The grid forgets. With Dominion Energy, we're building a grid that remembers every event at full resolution," said Sean Murphy, chief executive of PingThings. "The data archive, over time, becomes one of a utility's most valuable assets: it's what engineers investigate with, and it's what physical AI learns from."
Dr Kevin Jones, Director of Strategic Initiatives for Dominion Energy's Electric Transmission division, added that critical diagnostic information is often found not in an alarm but in measurements collected "days, weeks, or even years earlier."
Market context and competitive landscape
The grid data historian market is undergoing a structural shift as utilities face the dual pressure of electrification-driven load growth and the integration of variable renewable generation. Legacy historians from vendors such as OSIsoft (now part of AVEVA, itself acquired by Schneider Electric) were built for deterministic SCADA polling cycles rather than the sub-cycle, continuous-streaming requirements of modern phasor measurement and distributed energy resource monitoring.
A growing number of specialist vendors are competing for this modernisation budget, including Ampere Industrial Internet, Seeq and several cloud-native time-series database providers. Hyperscalers are also pushing into operational technology data management through offerings such as AWS IoT SiteWise and Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Energy. PingThings differentiates on physics-aware data modelling and the depth of its existing utility-grade archive, though the company has not published independently verified benchmark comparisons against competing platforms.
The alliance's industry engagement component, under which Dominion Energy will share findings through case studies and technical publications, functions as a reference-selling programme that could accelerate adoption at other investor-owned utilities and regional transmission organisations.
PingThings is also establishing a physical presence in Richmond, Virginia, relocating key leadership and committing to hire from the regional talent pool, supported by rotational programmes and fellowships with Dominion Energy. The company says it is expanding beyond utilities into data centres, aerospace and defence, and industrial systems, though no signed contracts in those verticals were disclosed in this release.
The partnership does not include disclosed financial terms, equity arrangements or revenue commitments, limiting external assessment of its commercial scale at this stage.