Nelson Launch (donnelson.cl)

A little over 60 days ago I set myself a challenge: build an AI agent capable of performing protection coordination studies on Chile's National Electrical System. Today that agent has a name, a website, and is ready to work with real teams.

It's called Nelson. And it lives at donnelson.cl.

The context

If you followed the series on this blog, you know this started as an experiment. An almost-electrical engineer (me) trying to teach an AI to use DIgSILENT PowerFactory, the industry standard tool for electrical studies in Chile.

The premise was simple: can an autonomous agent run power flows, short-circuits, and protection coordination without a human telling it step by step what to do?

The answer, after 60 days, 15 posts, hundreds of hours of development and BILLIONS of tokens consumed is: yes, it can.

It's not perfect (for now).

What is Nelson

Nelson is an AI agent that integrates as another team member in Microsoft Teams. It's not a chatbot that answers questions about regulations. It's an agent that executes.

You tell it: “Check the Cardones substation and see if it can handle 15 MW more”, and Nelson gets to work. It opens DIgSILENT, loads the project, runs the power flow, analyzes the results and responds with real numbers.

Specifically, Nelson can:

• Run power flows — analyzes voltage drops, redistributes loads, adjusts transformer taps.
• Run short-circuit studies — simulates three-phase, two-phase and single-phase faults on any busbar.
• Coordinate protections (Under Review) — checks relays, recalculates TMS and pickup, verifies grading margins.
• Generate technical reports — complete PDF reports with single-line diagrams, TCC curves, and settings tables. Ready to send to the client.

And it does it on its own workstation. Nelson has dedicated virtual machines running DIgSILENT in the cloud. It doesn't use your computer.

What changed in these 60 days

When I started on day 1, the agent could barely run a simple power flow. Today, in a typical session:

• Runs autonomous sessions of over 60 minutes
• Uses 21 specialized tools for grid analysis, protections, instrument transformers and visualization
• Generates 47+ page reports with full analysis
• Operates across 5 virtual machines in parallel thanks to a DAG-based architecture (directed acyclic graphs)
• Queries real data from Chile's National Electrical Coordinator, CNE and Infotécnica

The architecture evolved from ReAct to Plan-and-Execute. The agent first plans, generates a task DAG, and then executes them in parallel when possible. This drastically reduced simulation times.

Why Teams

In Chile, electric companies live in Microsoft Teams. Coordinators, consultants, generators — the sector's communication runs through it. Nelson isn't a new platform you have to learn. It's another colleague in your workspace.

You talk to it like you would talk to a colleague. And it responds with technical results.

Who is Nelson for

Nelson is for electrical engineering teams that do connection studies, ECAP, or any analysis involving DIgSILENT PowerFactory. If your team spends hours running simulations, preparing reports and verifying protection coordination, Nelson can do the heavy lifting so your team can focus on what really matters: technical judgment.

Consultants, transmission companies, generators, PMGD/PMG project developers — if you work with Chile's SEN, Nelson is designed for you.

Where Nelson is heading

Nelson today solves a concrete problem: running electrical studies faster. But the vision is bigger than that.

What I'm building is Latin America's first digital electrical engineer. An agent that not only runs simulations, but understands Chile's electrical system from end to end — from CNE regulations to the Electrical Coordinator's operational constraints.

The idea is for Nelson to evolve until it's capable of taking a new project — a solar plant, a wind farm, a PMGD — and doing the complete SEN connection analysis. Not as a tool that needs to be told what to do, but as an agent that understands the problem, proposes a strategy and executes it.

Today we're at the base of that. But every study Nelson completes, every report it generates, every simulation it runs, brings it closer to that vision. And the best part is that every team that uses it will help make it better — because real problems are the ones that truly teach.

I want you to see it

If you work in Chile's electrical sector (for now), I want to show you what Nelson can do. Not with slides or promises — with a real, live demo.

30 minutes. No strings attached.