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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.

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

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.

65

Idea Score, 0-100 · raw 39.4 x 1.64

Warm

competition: more crowded than 32% of ideas · headwind x0.84

+2.2

government priorities, secondary (7 matching grants)

Trend

42

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 sector68
  • 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.

  • Autolaneplugandplay PnP 2025 · 2025 · Robotics and physical worldalive

    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.

  • MicroHarvest GmbHplugandplay PnP 2024 · 2024 · Otheralive

    Delivering BETTER protein ingredients, today.

  • Pelmyc W22 · 2022 · Climate and energysite down

    Plaid for utilities

  • Portcastef EF Singapore 2017 · 2017alive

    Demand forecasting for logistics operators.

  • DeepVuplugandplay · B2B SaaSalive

    Artificial Intelligence solution for supply chain optimization and maximizing margins.

Run this as an Idea Check →

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

180

startup-relevant grants in Climate and energy

$155M

awarded in the sector, tracked

19

opportunities open now in the sector

All public money by sector →

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 · 92 → 112 → 184 → 97 → 32 new companies 2022 → 2026 · 91% aliveYC S26: 2 in this cluster, 1% of the batch (was 1% in X26) (F26 is still forming: 21 listed)Since February, of 118 YC companies here: 0 acquired, 2 shut down, 4 rewrote their pitch

Climate and energy: companies, trend and grants →

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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Swipe ideas like this in the deckTalk to the radar about it

Fictional company written 2026-08-22 from MarkosWeb data; the companies, grants and numbers around it are real and tracked. Treat the idea as a research prompt, not a plan.