New startup ideas · Physical world · Climate and energy
startup idea
Tariffwire
One API that turns every US utility tariff into hourly marginal cost per meter.
Tariffwire ingests utility tariff sheets, riders, demand charges, time-of-use calendars and interconnection rules from public PUC filings and returns, for any US service address, the hourly cost of the next kilowatt-hour and the cost of adding load.
- Infrastructure and APIs
- Enterprise
- $100B+ market
- Creates a new category
- US first
3/5
venture judge
2
similar startups, last 2 years (5 all-time)
96%
of 4 nearest real companies still alive
yes
7 matching federal grants and programs
Direction supported by government programs and grants
Test it before you build it
$700 · 3 weeks · 20 prospects
For $700 and 3 weeks, prove energy analysts will prepay $500 a month for tariff data they currently maintain for free in spreadsheets.
Riskiest assumption · Energy analysts who already maintain tariff spreadsheets from free public PUC filings will move real money, $500 prepaid per month, for the same public data delivered as an API.
1Focus group: who and where
The energy analyst or director of energy at a US data center developer or colocation operator siting 10 MW or more of new load, the utility-programs lead at an EV charging network, or the revenue modeler at a solar and storage developer - anyone who opened a utility tariff PDF this month to price load.
where to find 20 · 7x24 Exchange regional chapter meetings, where data center facility and energy people meet monthly; the Data Center Map directory of US colocation operators to build the top-30 operator target list; the RE+ trade show in September for the storage and solar developer segment; recent PUC rate-case dockets to see which companies filed interventions and therefore feel tariff pain now.
2Sell first, build later
A founding subscription to one endpoint returning hourly marginal cost and cost-of-new-load for any service address in the 20 US utilities carrying the most colocation load, live within 7 business days of payment, plus one bill recompute per month.
the ask · $500 per month, founding rate locked for 12 months against a $1,000 list price, first month prepaid.
a real yes · A cleared $500 prepayment or a $250 paid bill audit; 'send me the docs', free-trial requests and promises to evaluate next quarter are not a yes.
3Small experiments
The first one attacks the riskiest assumption; each ends with a number that says whether to run the next.
1. Prepay pitch on 15 calls
$250 · 10 days
Build the 20-name list from Data Center Map and 7x24 chapter rosters, book 15 calls, ask to see how they track tariffs today, then pitch the founding subscription covering the 20 largest colocation-serving utilities and ask for the first month prepaid on or right after the call. One founder sells, the other logs which utilities each prospect actually needs.
keep going if · 4 of 15 analysts prepay $500 within 3 days of the call, and 9 of 15 show a manually maintained tariff spreadsheet
2. Paid bill recompute
$150 · 10 days
Offer every interviewee a $250 paid audit: they send one meter's latest bill and service address, we recompute it line by line from the current tariff filing and flag discrepancies within 5 business days. The founders do the math by hand from the PUC filings; no code required.
keep going if · 5 of 15 interviewees pay $250 and send a real bill
3. Self-serve founding checkout
$300 · 14 days
Ship a one-page site with a card checkout that charges the first $500 month and promises an API key within 7 business days; early deliveries are hand-computed data for the buyer's named addresses behind a thin endpoint. Share the link in 7x24 chapters and with RE+ contacts.
keep going if · 3 checkout payments of $500 from the first 40 unique visitors
4Collect a deposit up front
Tesla took $1,000 refundable reservations for the Model 3 and $100 for the Cybertruck before building either: the deposit is the measurement, not the revenue.
$500
per prospect, refundable
how · First month prepaid at a card checkout on the founding page - the $500 amount fits a corporate card and this buyer already purchases developer tools self-serve, so a checkout beats a contract here; nothing to sign, the charge itself is the yes. set up: Stripe Checkout ↗
what it reserves · The $500 founding rate locked for 12 months, an API key within 7 business days, and a vote on which of the next 10 utilities gets covered first.
refund · Full refund on request within the first 30 days, no questions asked.
target · 4 prepaid subscriptions from 20 prospects within 3 weeks
Go: build it if
4 or more of 20 prospects prepay $500 within 3 weeks and 9 of 15 confirm a manually maintained tariff spreadsheet that broke a decision in the last quarter.
Kill: stop if
0 or 1 prepayments from 20 pitches, or 8 or more of 15 analysts say NREL's free Utility Rate Database plus their spreadsheet is good enough - the reference layer alone carries no willingness to pay.
5 Scripts to run itoutreach message, landing copy, deposit terms · click to open
outreach message
If your team sites data centers, someone on it keeps a tariff spreadsheet of demand charges and TOU calendars that goes stale every quarter. I am building Tariffwire, one API that returns the hourly marginal cost per kWh and the cost of adding load for any US service address, starting with the 20 utilities carrying the most colocation load. Founding subscribers pay $500 a month, locked for 12 months, first month prepaid. Can I get 20 minutes to recompute one of your meters against your sheet?
landing page
Hourly marginal cost for any US service address, one API $500 per month founding rate, locked 12 months, covering the top 20 colocation utilities; first month prepaid. Prepay month one and get your API key this week.
deposit terms
Your first month, $500, is charged today and activates your API key for the 20-utility corpus within 7 business days. It locks the $500 founding rate for 12 months against a $1,000 list price. Cancel within the first 30 days for a full refund.
Would you run this test?
One tap. The yes-share feeds the Demand pillar of this idea's score; nobody sees who answered.
Budgets are out-of-pocket estimates for a team of one to three, US market. Size the deposit to the deal, and check the terms before taking money in a regulated line.
Scorecard
One score that balances how trendy the idea is, the demand for it and its potential for 100x, with competition measured relative to every other idea in the catalog. Recent startup trends first, government priorities second.
61
Idea Score, 0-100 · raw 37.8 x 1.61
Warm
competition: more crowded than 32% of ideas · headwind x0.84
+2.2
government priorities, secondary (7 matching grants)
Trend
36
Is the wave forming now? 2025-26 entrants vs 2023-24, rounds since 2025, the sector's live-batch direction, the 2026 trend analyst.
- Entrants 2025-26 vs 2023-24 (similar companies)23
- Rounds announced 2025+ in the sector47
- Sector direction (live batch)50
- 2026 trend analyst25
Demand
39
Does anyone want it? YC's current RFS, companies already paid for something similar, the operator judge, founders' yes-rate in decks, readers who would run the test.
- YC asks for it (current RFS: idea / sector)0
- Someone already pays (similar companies, recent / all-time)42
- Operator judge: real pain75
100x potential
54
Can it return a fund? The venture judge (double weight), market-size and moat axes, neighbours still alive, the technologist judge.
- Venture judge50
- Market size axis100
- Moat axis20
- Neighbours still alive81
- Technologist judge25
Score = 100 x cbrt(Trend x Demand x 100x) x (1 - 0.5 x crowding) + government bonus (max 5), calibrated so the 95th-percentile idea scores 90 (order never changes). A geometric mean: a weak pillar cannot be papered over. Percentiles are among the 272 ideas in the catalog; the terms matched were utility, tariff, hourly, marginal, ingests, sheets, riders, demand.
The idea in full
- What
- Tariffwire ingests utility tariff sheets, riders, demand charges, time-of-use calendars and interconnection rules from public PUC filings and returns, for any US service address, the hourly cost of the next kilowatt-hour and the cost of adding load. Enterprise buyers are data center operators, EV charging networks, ERP and asset management vendors, and solar and storage developers who currently keep this in spreadsheets. Pricing is self-serve and per API call, with a flat enterprise tier above a call volume.
- Why now
- WattShift entered Techstars TS 2026 building exactly a utility rate database with price signals, and Condor Energy (YC W26) is selling enterprise energy procurement software on top of the same missing data, while Pelm, the 2022 attempt at Plaid for utilities, sits in the graveyard because account access was the wrong layer; tariff documents are public, so the reference layer can be built without any utility permission.
- Wedge: first customer and entry point
- Two people cover the twenty US utilities that serve the most colocation load, sell a single endpoint to the energy analysts at three data center developers, and let their own engineers self-serve API keys.
- Path to 100x
- US commercial and industrial electricity spend is a $100B+ base and every AI energy agent, procurement tool and siting model now needs a programmatic price for it, which is a category that does not exist as a product today. The path runs from read-only reference calls to sitting inside the transaction: bill validation, load-shift settlement and a share of verified savings, so the pricing layer becomes the accounting layer that competitors have to reconcile against.
- Ceiling
- Reference data alone plausibly caps at $100-300M of ARR, and if PUCs mandate machine-readable tariffs the product becomes a thin wrapper on a free feed.
- Closest real companies, as the generator saw them
- WattShift is closest and is building a rate database as a product for utilities and analysts; Tariffwire sells a read-only developer API and never touches customer accounts, which is where Pelm died. Condor Energy is a procurement application and a likely customer rather than a rival; Astro builds energy development workflows that need this data underneath.
- Main risk
- Tariff data is public, so a well-funded incumbent or an open dataset can replicate the corpus in a year and drive price per call to zero.
Five judges
Each judge scores every idea in the catalog with a named rubric; the venture judge decides whether a card is shown at all (4-5 is venture-grade).
Venture investor
3/5
Real $100B+ adjacency and self-serve API, but public tariff docs plus WattShift racing there means no compounding moat until it reaches settlement.
Bootstrapper
5/5
Two people cover twenty utilities and sell a self-serve API to buyers already paying analysts to maintain the same spreadsheets.
Operator
4/5
Data center energy analysts maintain tariff spreadsheets today, so the API replaces existing labor with no workflow change, but per-call reference data commoditizes fast.
Technologist
2/5
The corpus is public PUC filings, and the card itself admits a funded rival or open dataset rebuilds it in a year with no accumulating advantage.
Risk
5/5
Tariff sheets are public PUC filings, so no utility permission, no account access and no single platform can cut off the corpus.
trends
2/5
Tariff PDFs were equally public in 2023 and the card concedes no moat; demand from AI energy agents is asserted, not dated.
Similar startups in the directory
Companies whose pitch matches most of the idea's terms (utility, tariff, hourly, marginal, ingests, sheets, riders, demand): 5 all-time, 2 from the last two years. Same matching as Idea Check.
Autolane is an autonomous-vehicle operating system that lets retailers, QSRs, and malls manage pickups, ease traffic, boost customer convenience, and unlock delivery and ride-hail revenue.
Delivering BETTER protein ingredients, today.
Plaid for utilities
Demand forecasting for logistics operators.
Artificial Intelligence solution for supply chain optimization and maximizing margins.
The generator's reference companies
Real companies the model named as closest when it wrote the card, with their fate. A check mark is a company the radar could verify in its directory.
Public money in this direction
US federal grants, SBIR/STTR awards and open opportunities from the radar's public-money feed, matched to the idea's terms; the sector totals give the context.
7
grants and programs matching the idea
203
startup-relevant grants in Climate and energy
$167M
awarded in the sector, tracked
13
opportunities open now in the sector
National Science Foundation · SBIR Phase I · $305K · posted 2026-08-13
- I-Corps: Translation Potential of a Rapid Stress Detection Platform for Greenhouse Cropsawardhigh relevance
National Science Foundation · I-Corps · $50K · posted 2026-08-10
National Science Foundation · I-Corps · $50K · posted 2026-08-10
- Integrated High-Throughput Microfluidic-Mass Spectrometry for Enhanced Biomedical Data Generation and AI Model Trainingawardhigh relevance
NIH / NIGMS · SBIR phase II · $300K · posted 2026-08-04
- Beyond SPE: Automated Nanoparticle Workflow with Photo-Elution for High-Throughput, Scalable PFAS Monitoringawardhigh relevance
NIH / NIEHS · SBIR phase I · $307K · posted 2026-07-01
NIH / NIDCR · SBIR phase I · $406K · posted 2025-08-25
- CPS Small: Integrating Bayesian Deep Learning, Microeconometrics, and Graph-Based Data for Enhanced Interpretable Choice Models with Heterogeneous Network Interactionsawardmedium relevance
National Science Foundation · CPS-Cyber-Physical Systems · $600K · posted 2026-08-16
Market signal
What the radar sees in Climate and energy: new companies by cohort year, the forming YC batch, and outcomes since the February snapshot.
Climate and energy · 99 → 115 → 200 → 90 → 45 new companies 2022 → 2026 · 89% aliveYC F26 live: 1 in this cluster, 1% of the batch (was 1% in S26)Since February, of 118 YC companies here: 1 acquired, 2 shut down, 9 rewrote their pitch
Design attributes
The card is one cell of a designed set: every axis below was chosen before the text was written, and the text had to realize it.
- Buyer
- Enterprise
- Business model
- Infrastructure and APIs
- Path to 100x
- Creates a new category
- Market size
- $100B+ market
- Capital intensity
- Capital-light (software margins)
- Speed to revenue
- Revenue within a year
- Technical depth
- Integrations, no-code
- Go-to-market
- Self-serve
- Moat
- No moat yet
- Geography
- US first
- Regulation
- Some regulation
- Vibe
- Boring business
Listed under
An idea sits in its own sector and in any sector its text clearly touches.
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