If I remember correctly, they were never able to hit their goals because of drilling down into magma chambers. The steam coming up was also of a different scale than regular geothermal steam, causing corrosion that has not been dealt with before.
As far as I know, the main problem is coming up with casing materials that can withstand the extreme corrosive environment at scale and at cost, and for IDDP that's one of the main focuses.
For the people I've talked with so far, it means 1) they don't have to re-implement the spreadsheet logic in their server, and 2) whenever the spreadsheet is updated (either Google sheet edit, or an Excel file is uploaded again) the API is automatically up to date.
Some of these people are already creating GRID documents backed by their existing spreadsheets, and have a use case to make an API call from their own systems to perform a computation that already lives in the spreadsheet.
Notice I'm not talking about writing data to the spreadsheet and using it as a database. I'm talking about reading values from a spreadsheet model through a queryable API. Not sure how AirTable and DataTables compare – will have to look into that.
I'm a developer at GRID [1]. GRID turns spreadsheets into interactive web documents, and we recently built a system which allows our users to effectively turn their spreadsheets into a web service and query it via a JSON API.I recently tweeted [2], asking if some of my friends had ever re-implemented spreadsheet logic in code or otherwise wished they could've accessed spreadsheet values through...
The good news is, for your own GRID documents, they're going to be backed by a spreadsheet file you made or already have access to.
However, in the case of GRID documents made by others, it's up to them if they want to make the underlying spreadsheet model available to the users viewing the GRID document. You can see an example of this here: https://grid.is/@sigrid/scenario-analysis-user-funnel-P1yGUF... – at the bottom of the document, the document author has made the spreadsheet available for anyone.
Hope this helps.
This is exactly the reason why we built Avo (https://www.avo.app). It's designed for everyone on the team: product managers, analysts, data scientists and developers. It works by generating code derived from an analytics spec, which you create and maintain in a user friendly web app.
You can check it out and reach out to me [email protected], I'm happy to help any way I can.