Two weeks to build initial platform with unified Google Cloud ecosystem
Increases renewables project success rate by 50%
Reduces infrastructure maintenance from 50 hours per week to 2-3
MeanderX uses Vertex AI and Gemini to process fragmented utility data into clear insights that speed up renewable energy development.
MeanderX uses Vertex AI and Gemini to process fragmented utility data into clear insights that speed up renewable energy development.
Implementing AI infrastructure to relieve the grid bottleneck
Vertex AI Search makes it easy to dump hundreds of thousands of PDFs into storage, while Gemini makes it really simple to process them. That's what drove us to Google Cloud.
Robert Huppertz
CEO and Co-founder, MeanderX
The global push for clean energy, coupled with the electricity demands of the AI boom, have created a significant challenge for the energy grid. For renewable energy developers, or companies citing new data centers, the process of connecting a project to the grid is often the biggest, most complex bottleneck.
That's the challenge Robert Huppertz and Jack Angela set out to solve with the launch of MeanderX. Based in Germany, Huppertz and Angela are on a mission to accelerate the clean energy transition. Their first venture, Orbio Earth, uses AI to analyze satellite imagery to track and reduce global methane emissions. With MeanderX, they're bringing their AI expertise to the renewable energy sector, making it faster and easier for renewable energy developers to connect to the power grid and meet growing energy demands.
The challenge renewable developers face is around data visibility. Critical information about grid capacity, future updates, and permits is often buried across thousands of messy, unstructured public documents. These include utility plans, regulatory filings, county-based environmental assessments, and press releases that lie scattered across various portals and websites. Developers who can access and understand this data first gain a significant competitive advantage. MeanderX's mission is to turn all chaotic energy-related data into insights that help developers bet on the right locations and projects, and avoid wasting time in years-long interconnection queues.
To build this kind of deep intelligence layer, MeanderX needed a powerful and highly integrated AI infrastructure that was easy to deploy and maintain.
"Vertex AI Search makes it easy to dump hundreds of thousands of PDFs into storage, while Gemini makes it really simple to process them. That's what drove us to Google Cloud," explains Robert Huppertz, CEO and co-founder of MeanderX.
Unearthing powerful grid insights with Vertex AI and Gemini
With Google Cloud, MeanderX has simplified the complex process of turning unstructured data into structured grid intelligence. At its core is an automated data processing agent, built using Agent Development Kit (ADK). This agent scrapes thousands of public documents, stores them in Cloud Storage, and uses Vertex AI Search as an efficient search functionality to make the data instantly queriable. The Gemini models, running on serverless infrastructure, including Cloud Run and managed by Cloud Composer, then act as an agent to analyze the raw data. This process relies on Gemini's robust Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities, which are essential for accurately reading and extracting text from the scanned images and complex PDF formats. Once the text is extracted, the agent identifies specific information, such as plans for a new transmission line or an update to a substation, and uses it to build a structured database, which is managed by Cloud SQL.
The fact that ADK and Gemini are integrated with Google Search is really helpful. When our agent finds mention of a new substation in a PDF, we need to search for related information online. Previously, we built our own search tooling, so having Google Search built in produces great results.
Robert Huppertz
CEO and Co-founder, MeanderX
MeanderX uses this structured data to help renewable energy developers and data centers find optimal land for development by seeing not only current capacity, but also where new substations will soon be built. This forward-looking intelligence allows customers to secure leases and begin the permitting process ahead of competitors, saving months of valuable development time.
By unifying their operations within the Google Cloud ecosystem, MeanderX was able to build and roll out the first platform in just two weeks. Inspired by this success, the MeanderX team also decided to migrate their existing Orbio Earth infrastructure to Google Cloud. This migration helped reduce the company's cloud infrastructure maintenance workload from approximately 50 hours to just two or three hours a week, freeing up the small team to focus on development and innovation.
Building the future of renewable energy with Google Cloud
Switching to Google Cloud and embedding ourselves in its AI ecosystem has transformed us from a great technical ship into an AI speedboat, allowing us to rapidly expand our offering. We're excited to continue that fast development with Google Cloud as we work to accelerate the clean energy transition.
Robert Huppertz
CEO and Co-founder, MeanderX
With MeanderX built on Google Cloud, renewable energy developers now have the intelligence they need to build projects in places that connect quickest to the grid. Having successfully launched in four key states across the United States, MeanderX is now expanding to approximately 20 US states, bringing its powerful grid insights to many more across the entire renewable energy value chain.
At the same time, MeanderX plans to continue expanding the platform's intelligence layers by automating the detection of permitting and compliance risks — another area where large amounts of unstructured regulatory data create significant bottlenecks. This commitment to continuous innovation requires the team to stay up to date with the best-performing AI models, and they're particularly excited to use Gemini 3 to continue improving performance, cost-efficiency, and accuracy for their large-scale PDF analysis pipelines.
"Switching to Google Cloud and embedding ourselves in its AI ecosystem has transformed us from a great technical ship into an AI speedboat, allowing us to rapidly expand our offering," Huppertz concludes. "We're excited to continue that fast development with Google Cloud as we work to accelerate the clean energy transition."
MeanderX, from the team behind Orbio Earth, uses AI to translate unstructured public data into actionable grid intelligence, helping energy companies accelerate the clean energy transition.
Industries: Technology, Energy
Location: Germany
Products: Google Cloud, Agent Development Kit (ADK), Cloud Composer, Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Gemini, Vertex AI Search
