Methodology

Why a grade, not a date

Grid operators publish reinforcement schedules, but those dates slip. A specific promise (“connection in 2027”) is misleading in a congested area — the relevant question isn’t when a project can connect but how long relative to other areas. Speed to Power therefore reports a national percentile on an A–F scale — relative, and therefore stable as the whole market shifts.

Consumption vs feed-in

Every feeding area gets two independent grades:

• CConsumption (Dutch: afname) — how quickly a new data centre, factory, heat-pump cluster, or EV hub can be connected.
• FFeed-in (Dutch: opwek / teruglevering) — how quickly a new solar farm, wind project, or battery in feed-in mode can be connected.

An area can be A on feed-in and F on consumption (or vice versa). The map shows one at a time; toggle via the Direction control at the top.

The two-layer trap

The Dutch grid has two layers: the DSO (Liander, Stedin, Enexis, Coteq, RENDO, Westland Infra) runs the medium-voltage network; TenneT sits above with high voltage. An area can have headroom at the DSO while TenneT is already saturated. When this happens the grade is capped at C until TenneT’s published relief year passes — at which point the cap drops and the grade recovers to the uncapped percentile.

The composite score

Per feeding area, four signals are blended into a 0–100 composite, then ranked into national percentiles:

All weights are open and inspectable in backend/app/scoring.py. The grade is the national percentile of the composite within each direction.

Stress inference (DC load-flow)

Alongside the published grades, Speed to Power runs a steady-state DC load-flow over the silver network graph to estimate per-bus loading at 15-minute cadence. This drives the curtailment estimator, the Solar Workbench, and the per-DSO scorecard. It’s classification-grade — right roughly 75-85% of the time on the binary “is this bus stressed?” question, ±20-30% on absolute loading.

F1 is computed against published redispatch events per area on a rolling 30-day window. Drift means the model needs recalibration; a high F1 means “publishable” on this surface.

The same load-flow powers the Congestion Calculator (per-area grid congestion) and the Stress Lens (inferred substation congestion); the Congestion Calculator methodology documents exactly how those per-area figures are derived.

Bronze → silver → gold pipeline

Data flows through three tiers. Bronze keeps raw per-source tables for audit + diff (one schema per operator). Silver unifies topology into a single network graph with deterministic bus IDs (e.g. tennet:EEM380). Gold materialises per-consumer endpoints — no customer-facing chart reads from bronze directly.

Accuracy bands

Every customer-facing output from the inference chain carries this band in its methodology footer. The bands are the binding §3.5 constraint of the build plan — ship with them or don’t ship.

Not bankable. For commitments above €5M CAPEX, validate against the DSO-specific ATR85 contract template. More on the curtailment estimator · More on the DSO scorecard.

Sources & update cadence

• Netbeheer Nederland — national capaciteitskaart (monthly).
• TenneT — investment plan and relief year per HV substation.
• Stedin — waiting-list disclosures.
• Liander — feeder-area geometry (CC-BY 4.0).

Every new national snapshot recomputes all grades and re-prerenders the region pages. The last-updated stamp on every page comes from that snapshot.