Yes. The default posture is observe and recommend. Helios runs in shadow mode. It forecasts, plans, and shows you the dispatch it would have made, with the savings it would have produced, while writing nothing. You enable writes per system, per limit, when you are ready. Sensing and acting are separate planes with a read-only boundary between them.

Some flexibility to move, and a read path to see it. That means shiftable processes, storage, on-site generation, or deferrable compute, plus access to your meter and control systems. The more flexibility you have, the larger the peak Helios can shave. You do not have to commit blind: in shadow mode it quantifies the opportunity on your own load before you enable a single write.

No. Helios reads from your control systems and writes bounded setpoints back when permitted. Your systems keep final authority and enforce every safety limit. Helios adds the forecasting and peak-scheduling layer that aligns your load, storage, and on-site generation with price and capacity, which those systems were never designed to do.

Critical and contractual loads are pinned and never shifted: safety-bound processes, and latency or SLO-bound jobs against their contract. Helios optimizes only the slack. Shiftable processes, battery charge and discharge, on-site generation, and deferrable compute such as training, batch inference, and ETL all carry tolerance it can use. The objective minimizes cost and carbon, with every limit as a hard constraint.

From whatever sources you trust. Helios accepts standard market, network-tariff, and carbon feeds where you have them, and runs fully offline against your own forecasts where you do not. Feed ingestion is self-hostable. There are no external service calls in the core loop, so an air-gapped deployment loses no core function.

Yes. Demand response, curtailment avoidance, and battery dispatch are solved in the same optimization as load and compute scheduling, rather than bolted on as separate tools. Helios can hold or shed flexible load during a program window and recover it in the next clean or low-cost window, with the trade-off visible before it acts.

Provenance is a transactional write, not a log line. Every dispatch decision records the forecast, the signal, and the constraint set that produced it, in the same transaction. Any decision in the console walks back to the originating grid record in one step, so the output drops straight into an audit bundle, a network-tariff or capacity-charge claim, or a contract reconciliation.

Helios is Apache 2.0 and developed openly, consistent with the rest of the Scalytics stack. The repository is inspectable before purchase. The OpenAPI specification is the contract, and the layer it runs on, including kafSCALE, kafGRAPH, and Apache Wayang, is already open. You are never locked to a binary you cannot read.