Jen Szaro:

Welcome to this week's episode of AESP's Energy Beat podcast. I'm Jen Szaro, your host. This podcast is all about amplifying the voices of our AESP community and tracking our progress as we chart a course toward a cleaner and more sustainable energy future. In this segment, I'll be joined by Carmen Best, Vice President of Policy at Recurve and Marc Romito, Vice President of Markets at Elevation Energy Solutions. Together, we'll take a deeper dive into better understanding the benefits and the challenges of developing a more holistic and responsive energy ecosystem that will enable us to create greater market participation as well as optimize the art of flexible load management, so that we can develop win-win solutions for end users, electric utilities in the distribution system and wholesale energy markets.

Jen Szaro:

Together, companies like Recurve and Home Energy Solutions are making the concept of virtual power plants come to life in new and exciting ways. So with that, Carmen and Marc, welcome to the show. And excited to talk to you about all this really cool and innovative stuff you're working on in the grid interactive load management space. So tell us more first about Recurve, Carmen and then Marc, I'd love to hear more about what you're working on with Elevation.

Carmen Best:

Great. Thanks for having me, Jen. Recurve is a settlement platform for distributed energy resources and we really got our start building from the bottom up from standardized measurement and verification, which is the space that I was coming from in the energy efficiency world, and then have been continuing to build that out for products and services that can bleed into resource planning. So understanding where the opportunities for distributed energy resources lay, where all the tracking and monitoring that can happen. And then on the back end, my favorite part of our tool, which is perhaps the most boring, is the audit trail, which we call Ledger. And that's really where you can have this accounting record of all of the exchanges that are happening and it's really valuable to regulators and the parties in the settlement process to be able to see all the details of what the savings were, what the value was, and then what money exchanged hands in response to that.

Jen Szaro:

So instead of using deemed savings, which we often saw in the industry or calculations, you're able to really track down to the second, it sounds like, with really well defined and measured benefits to the grid. Is that right?

Carmen Best:

Yeah, we're actually doing hourly energy consumption modeling. It came out of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, so folks are familiar with the time of week and temperature modeling, it's really a derivative of that because most of the information that you need for settlement and energy efficiency and even in a lot of cases for demand response, hourly results are sufficient to make that decision.

Jen Szaro:

Okay, got it. So does this tie at all into some of the things we're hearing now in the market about transactive energy and blockchain? And if so, how do these capabilities tie into that?

Carmen Best:

In the space of transactive energy, I think a lot of folks are thinking of that as either peer-to-peer energy exchange or market developments that can optimize rates, et cetera. DOE is very engaged in grid interactive buildings, et cetera, and I think that what the Recurve platform really offers is it's available now. So that's one thing that it offers is that it can leverage these investments that we've already made in advanced metering infrastructure in many states like my home state of California, to really make sure that we're understanding the time value of the changes in energy consumption that we're driving. So the transaction is really still between a customer and aggregator and the utility and then potentially validating that with a regulator or with a supply side market monitor. But it's living in that space of more an operational resource that can be available for both load modifying, the retail version of energy management programs that we've had, but also can be used for settlement for supply side resources. So it doesn't have to get too fancy with integrated technologies, et cetera, that are speaking back to the grid. But all of those things can also optimize the payments that could be happening for aggregators that are participating in what we call flex markets or which is really our version of a virtual power plant.

Jen Szaro:

That's so helpful. Thank you so much for helping differentiate between those two concepts. All right. So Marc, tell us a little bit about what you're working on now with Elevation Home Energy Solutions and a little bit about you.

Marc Romito:

Hi, Jen. Hi, Carmen. Thank you very much for the invite to be here. Elevation Home Energy Solutions is a whole home energy focused company. The center of our universe is actually data and we have a proprietary real-time energy monitoring hardware and software algorithm that allows us to combine a great number of different distributed technologies like energy monitoring solar device controls, whether it's thermostats or water heaters, EV batteries, that kind of thing. It allows us to harmonize and integrate those types of devices to perform energy management capabilities that serve largely the institutional home rental industry. So we do a lot of work with institutional portfolios of hundreds of thousands of homes throughout mostly the Sunbelt in the United States to help them achieve resident savings to help them deploy technologies like solar, energy monitoring, energy efficiency into an underserved class of customers in the form of renters.

Marc Romito:

We then also take all that data and aggregate it so that we can provide tech-enabled operating efficiencies. And you think, imagine all the data you could get on real-time monitoring of hundreds of thousands of houses. What can that tell you about the health and efficacy of your air conditioner? What can that tell you about the usage of your appliances? Our business is centered on data. The technology is a bit secondary, but in the home it's a relatively unsophisticated environment. If we were to compare a house to a car, in a car, you have a check engine light and a speedometer and odometer, a whole bunch of bells and whistles and the houses cost a lot more than cars, but they have almost none of that intelligence. So we provide that intelligence.

Marc Romito:

We allow primarily renters in our model to engage with energy so they're not just getting some bill from a utility that's in who-cares-a-watt jargon. They're getting actual information they can use to help them save money and make more informed decisions. As we do all of that on the data side to the portfolio operators, on the energy engagement side to the renters, to the homeowners, to the residents, we are able to, because of the scale of our business, we're able to start to deploy these technologies that produce energy, reduce energy, and manage the time of energy usage to actually help be able to aggregate into meaningful scale for virtual power plant aggregation.

Jen Szaro:

Wow. Well, I'm going to come back to who-cares-a-watts, because I think that's such a great key phrase for the average consumer and homeowner and renter and really would like to investigate that a little more. Also, I am a Recurve user as you know, Marc, and have this at my own home. And I have to say now on three separate occasions, the data and visualization that your tool provides to us has allowed us to identify issues with our pool pump, our water heater, and now our upstairs HVAC system. So it's working, it's really doing its job and helping us make better decisions about our energy usage to improve the performance of our house. So I thank you for that.

Marc Romito:

That's great to hear.

Jen Szaro:

Yeah, it's really exciting to see something that you think of as conceptual, really working in your own home and what it could mean for the customer, of course, what it could mean for the utility too, if they were to link in with me on it.

Jen Szaro:

So Carmen, we're going to start with you on how you came to be with Recurve and just tell us how you began pursuing this idea of a virtual power plant by weaving together all of these thousands of flexible loads into this army, if you will, of grid assets. I mean, it really does make me think about that last Star Trek movie we had with Iridis Elba as Captain Kirk's energy sucking nemesis, and he had this swarm of little spaceships that all came together to attack. I know that sounds crazy, but I feel like if I don't use pop culture references, sometimes people have no clue what I'm talking about, but that's how I would describe it to my parents. So we're going to start with that. So how did your team come up with this crazy and amazing idea of creating this virtual power plant platform really to gather up all of these great resources?

Carmen Best:

Yeah, thanks Jen. I'm more of a Star Wars gal, so I liken it much more to an Ewok village. It's kind of a version of the rebellion against the status quo because our CEO, Matt Golden, was really trying to make things work as an aggregator or a home performance contractor in fact, and was really finding that a lot of the incentives and technology based rebates that were available to his company really were missing the component of actual performance. And they were trying to up the ante and the quality of work they were doing, getting really highly skilled employees, et cetera, and weren't really being paid anymore for the quality work that they were able to do and felt like they were getting undermined in the market by other providers that would get paid the same incentives but weren't doing the same quality of work.

Carmen Best:

And then that has morphed over time in that early iteration of Recurve 1.0, he had started working on data integration and platforms that could help assess performance and then use performance as the basis of payments within these programs as opposed to using the deemed savings model. So meanwhile, I was over at the Public Utilities Commission in California managing the energy efficiency evaluation portfolio and coming to some same conclusions. We were putting a lot of money and resources into assessing the changes in energy consumption that we were seeing based on ex post evaluations and ex post assessments vis-a-vis deemed and we were also operating in a very heated shareholder incentive mechanism space. And then we'd made this huge investment in advanced metering infrastructure and we were essentially not using it at all for assessing post performance. So Matt and I got to know each other a lot better after a piece of legislation was passed in California that called for all energy efficiency programs and demand response to be assessed at the meter where possible.

Carmen Best:

And that launched a whole web of activities that led to our current framework of being able to implement what we call flex market. It's called market access model in California. It was adopted by the Public Utilities Commission last year and it's kind of the culmination of all these meter based solutions to be able to offer a platform that can allow for all those creative companies like Marc just described, have a way that they can bring their resources or their solutions directly to customers without having to wade through a utility RFP process, without having to even potentially have direct contracts with utilities. They can just have a conduit by which they can demonstrate the performance of their interventions with their customers and that are also utility customers. And then the utilities have the flexibility to buy that back from this wide range of market actors that are already innovating very, very quickly out in the market.

Carmen Best:

And back to the Ewok analogy, remember how they had all these crazy cool things that they were pulling together and they were kind of sticks and stuff. It's a lot more high tech I suppose in Star Trek, but same sort of concept. We want to be able to enable this innovation and bring it quickly back to customers and the utilities. So demand side resources can be a dynamic asset to the grid and not just this long, just technology incentive based deployment. We're not just trying to deploy technologies anymore, we're trying to use these resources to manage the grid and optimize the grid, especially when it's penetrated with more renewables. This is our moment to really be valued as a grid resource.

Jen Szaro:

Yeah, I love this effort for so many reasons. One being I feel like utilities are always struggling to justify their investments in AMI and all the bells and whistles that go with investing in these meters and the infrastructure and the back end head to support them. This is such a great use of that information that's very thought on validating for what they're trying to accomplish toward their goals as well. But they're not the ones that have to deal with it. You allow for these innovators to come in with your flex market tool and actually bring them the savings that they're trying to achieve in a way that's much more efficient and just faster, really, than they could possibly ever innovate through I think in the current regulatory environment they're faced with. So what a win-win. It's a really exciting platform and I know companies like Marc's, who we're going to hear more about here in a minute, this does give them that very easy entry point to have a huge impact as a grid asset for the system. What an exciting time we live in. I mean I couldn't have imagined something like this being available to utilities and to the market even 10 years ago, seven years ago, five years ago. It's so great to see this kind of development.

Jen Szaro:

So Marc, tell me a little bit about your organization. I mean, your concept's equally captivating. We talked about this rental market and how you're working with these big groups of corporate owned rental homes and turning them into a fleet of intelligent and also potentially grid interactive energy assets when paired with organizations like Carmen's. And you're also improving the overall comfort and home energy experience for the home. So it's a win for the renters, seems like it's a win for the building owners, but then also you've got this extra layer of value you're bringing to the table with all this knowledge and data that lets it also become this measurable grid asset. So how did that insane combination of ideas actually pop into your head?

Marc Romito:

Well, I'll take you on a little journey through my career. It's really kind of a story that I think is interesting for the audience just to consider as we try to build this ecosystem out in America. I spent 17 years in the electric utility industry. I ran renewable energy programs, I ran energy efficiency programs, electric vehicles, batteries, micro grid. I worked in resource management. I was a part of utility scale, solar and battery projects and programs. And that's a luxury. I got to grow up from the beginning of this whole movement, this whole industry from ground zero with one solar system at a time. And I can remember when a 20 kilowatt solar system deployed in one of the service territories where I was in charge, that would be a huge party. The mayor would be there, senator would be there. Fast forward a few years, and now at least in the region where I work, there's more than 250,000 solar deployments in the residential space alone.

Marc Romito:

There's millions of thermostats, millions of connected devices. And what that started as program work and regulatory requirements and some sort of maybe a customer service initiative really started to have a significant impact on the grid, not just at a localized level but on the entire region. The entire western region was starting to feel the impact of energy imbalance and a change in the status quo. And I remember an epiphany, a moment when I was had the great opportunity to go on an executive fact finding mission with the Smart Electric Power Association down to Australia. And Jen, I think you remember that.

Jen Szaro:

I do. That was a great trip, actually.

Marc Romito:

Yeah, a great trip. And one of the most impressing things to me was in Queensland, Australia, they had a very similar high penetration issue going on with rooftop solar and they had figured out some pretty interesting ways to harmonize other devices like HVAC, in particular water heaters to help solve for some of that imbalance. And so that got me thinking and started to think, "Okay, how can we start to lever these devices to really have them make an impact to help the grid, help stabilize the grid, help offer resources a service, and it capitulated in an emergency modality. We're not playing around here. This isn't a game. We're talking about the 24/7, 365. The economic backbone of American society is the electric grid.

Marc Romito:

I had a conversation with somebody who was running the system and one of the companies I was at, and he came to me and he said, "Look, I need you to bring around a lot of hundreds of megawatts of micro grids pretty soon. We need every tool in the toolkit in order to be able to manage the system well." And so I said, thinking, "Do you really care what the resource is or do you care more about resource adequacy? Do you care more about resource equivalency?" Meaning as long as what is being performed scratches the itch or solves the problem, do you care what technology is being using. And that opens this whole new open-mindedness that we're seeing start to really take traction, that if you can harmonize technology to actually produce when energy is needed or reduce when energy needs to be reduced, or move some load around, you do that once, going back to the beginning of my career doesn't really matter. It's nice for a resident, it's nice for a homeowner. You do that 10,000 times, 20,000 times, 50,000 times, you're now in power plant world. Now you're making an impact that's in the tens to hundreds of megawatts. And that's possible in every single market where there is imbalance, not just the western United States, not just the desert Southwest where I happen to live.

Marc Romito:

So in my company now, it isn't just a matter of saying, "Okay, there's a concept that, there's a vision that can be realized," to say, "Okay, how do you do that?" You have to have data, you have to have technology that works and you have to have the ability to actually get that energy produced when it needs to be or reduced when it needs to be reduced or moved and monitored. And so we have to provide visibility and telemetry and it's not rocket science. We're talking about something that in the commercial landscape has been happening since the 1980s. Now it's residential aggregation's day to shine, and now we have the technologies in place and the capabilities to make it happen and to satisfy these very significant problems that we're seeing arise all over the United States, whether it's in Texas or California or Arizona, anywhere there's imbalance.

Jen Szaro:

Yeah, it's funny. So that sort of attitude of in the utility sector I think is still something we've got to wrestle with for this to take off. And it's funny, back in the good old days when I was first deploying solar with my utility and we only had a few homeowners and they had 4 kW project here, 2 kW project there, the system operators didn't care about this. It didn't affect them, they didn't see it on the system. But when you start talking about 50,000 or 60,000 of these and they're paired with all of these demand flexible technologies that can be orchestrated and optimized, I mean that's just a much different picture to think about and it feels like we're finally getting some traction with grid operators now to take this seriously. And that's pretty exciting to me.

Jen Szaro:

So given that, how have your relationships with utilities, both of you, evolved over time as you build up capabilities with these areas of expertise in your respective organizations? And what do you think those relationships are going to start to look like, both at the distribution level and then more broadly at the bulk power system level as you ramp up your capabilities? Carmen, you want to start with that one?

Carmen Best:

Sure. I think the main thing that we've learned is you just need to meet your utility partners where they're at. They're dealing with lots of different regulatory constructs, urgency, lack of urgency, overbuilt systems, underbuilt systems, imbalance, emergency, the list goes on and on. I don't need to go through all of them. But we're finding that the value of visibility of how demand side assets are performing is step one. Understand what kind of resource you have in hand. And that goes for energy efficiency, demand response providers, EV folks as well, just understanding how these are operating and then how they're also operating together. So we think the whole house or whole building analytic model is really important because as Marc is saying, there's so many different ways you can be combining these assets to optimize to a grid need that we're really relying on aggregators to be a bit of a translator, build the bridge back to what the utility and then the grid is going to need.

Carmen Best:

So I think meeting folks where they're at, making sure that they have that telemetry. And then the next layer is really building that accountability through trusting pay for performance models. And when you can have transparent measurement verification, all parties understand what that is, how they're likely to be paid in that scenario, then you can build the trust and really give a little more flexibility to the providers in exchange for a little more accountability and performance risk on their part. Not talking about performance risk to customers, that's a different thing. But to creative aggregators that have ways to mitigate, manage risk across their portfolios.

Carmen Best:

And then from there, really the sky's the limit in terms of how you can be incorporating flex markets or aggregated assets into competitive procurement models, be those non-wires alternative solutions, IRPs for long term planning, all kinds of different aspects because you've cracked the nut on what is this thing that we're tracking and monitoring? How is it likely to perform? And then how can we use that? What's the time value of these resources so we can map that back to our forecasts and expectations of how the rest of the grid is going to perform? And we're finding that those messages, if you take it on a stepwise approach, utilities are able to build out that capacity to figure out how they can utilize our platform to greatest effect.

Jen Szaro:

Yeah, that makes really good sense to me, especially the time value emphasis. Because that is something I feel our industry historically hasn't focused on as heavily as maybe they could have because they didn't have the data or the quality of the data that you're working with today. So for Marc, what has been your experience working with the utility sector and where do you see that headed for you?

Marc Romito:

Yeah, for me it's a bit unique because I've worked for so long in the regulated utility landscape and saw this, like Carmen did in her experience up front as well as you, Jen, in your career. And a lot has changed and a lot of new opportunities have presented themselves. And I think what it really starts off with is what are the tools that's within the toolkit? So what does that really mean? What problems are we trying to solve? And when you're talking to utility people, you're usually either talking to renewable program, energy efficiency program people or grid operators. And sometimes those two camps of people don't necessarily see things the same for a lot of good reasons. And I think Carmen's point of the time value of energy is super hyper critical for everybody listening to this and everybody who's thinking about this kind of stuff to really start to understand. And it's pretty simple.

Marc Romito:

There are 8,760 hours in a year, that's just how many hours there are. And energy is consumed all the time, but it's not consumed the same in any one of those 8,760 hours in a year. And so the real problems that have emerged, the real grid goes down, blackouts roll, people suffer, society suffers, the real problems aren't happening all the time. They're happening in the worst 20 hours of a year. And so a lot of energy, a lot of money is being spent to develop the kind of peaking resources, the kind of balancing resources that can solve for those worst 20 hours. And so then it comes to, okay, what are the tools? In the competitive industry and the unregulated side as a DER aggregator and as a technologist, we have to tell the truth, you have to have technologies that actually can solve for those 20 hours and you can't make up stories. And there's been too much smoke and mirrors, a lot of hype and fiction. Just put it out there about claims being made that grid services could be accomplished when they really couldn't. That's done the industry some damage.

Marc Romito:

The opportunity is to say, "Okay, time out. We understand this 20 hour per year problem, that's real." Look, these technologies, whether it's a combination of solar and thermostats or water heater controls or energy efficiency in a passive manner or behavioral demand or something, whatever it is, there's multiple different technologies out there that can solve for those hours. And in the residential space, the guys in the resource planning context, here's the reality, you can move up one to two kW for four or five hours relatively easy through a combination of mechanisms. Like I said, doing that one time, nobody cares, it's rounding error. Doing that tens of thousands, twenties of thousands of times, you're starting to get into the 20, 40, 50, up to a hundred megawatt type of range.

Marc Romito:

And I can tell you from my experience in the utility space, you start to get into those megawatts, that starts to count. That's what really helps. And so then acknowledging that this truth is out there, that there needs to be multiple tools in the toolkit, that there really is a super hyper focus on those worst hours of the year. And it could be in the winter, it could be in the summer, doesn't matter, all over the country. And then to say, "Okay, what has been the strategy so far and is it working? In the residential space, let's take a look at the game film in a figurative sense. Go back and look at what happened in the winter outages in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and the Midwest, and what the strategy with residential customers was. If you can remember reading the press, there were conservation emails and conservation messages.

Marc Romito:

It's like a Hail Mary in the residential space. Utilities throwing out and grid operators throwing out this Hail Mary thing, "Conserve now. Conserve now." Well, that's not the best way. That's a recognition that we collectively as a society need to harness the capability of residential technology to help solve some of the worst problems and to function as power plants, but let's do it in an organized matter, let's do it in a strategic manner.

Marc Romito:

The grid is not an unsophisticated thing. It's 24/7, 365, it's got power quality, it's got energy and capacity. There's all kinds of nuances and complexities. So let's invite the toolbox to widen out a little bit and really start to harness the capability that's right here. And that's what I think we're doing and that's what Recurve is doing. You can see it start to come to life and you can see it start to take place. It's going to be a paradigm shift in the American energy economy.

Jen Szaro:

Yeah, I agree. It's definitely a disruption in a good way. And I think it's just going to be important that you do have partners like yourselves that can demonstrate the capability to have a positive impact on the grid.

Jen Szaro:

So to that issue, Carmen, when you're looking for your deployment partners to work with you on your platform, what kind of a partnership works best for you? What does that look like? What's a strong partner for you?

Carmen Best:

We're looking for folks that can understand customer needs, can connect with customers, and can deliver value to customers and to the grid. They play that bridge role. But to be honest, we're very agnostic. We certainly want to ensure that customers are having a good experience and that we don't have fly by night folks running around doing shoddy work, et cetera. But a lot of the evidence of their success comes in terms of our measurement verification that we see at the meter. So we're providing that feedback to aggregators so they can optimize their delivery of these programs or these services to customers and it helps them. They have an actuarial feedback loop where they can be optimizing and improving, et cetera. A lot of them are going to have tools like Marc is describing, kind of embedded data, telemetry technologies and things that they're getting their own real-time information. And so those are all really important solutions.

Carmen Best:

We're also finding aggregators find a special niche like Marc was describing that they're working multi-family renters. We have other folks that do a lot of grocery stores. Some are focused on grow houses so they can really understand energy usage in a specific sector and then translate that into how it can be optimized to the grid value that's being reflected in the price signals for our market. So it takes all kinds. We're doing these markets for both residential and non-residential and we're just seeing a lot of variability or diversity, I guess I should say, in terms of the solutions that are coming forward. And that's a great thing because we don't want to have to plan that out. The market is really innovative right now and we really love how this platform offers a way to tap into that and drive change really quickly.

Jen Szaro:

Yeah, that's a really interesting aspect of what you can do because I was thinking about this and it would be so helpful I think to have that diversity because you want to be dealing with every hour. People are peaking at different places different times and so having that flexibility to see in some cases you need maybe the residential HVAC load reduction, but in other cases maybe it's a reduction of electric vehicle charging or refrigeration and AC for commercial building. So I think this is such a winning infrastructure approach that gives you that flexibility to change different load profiles basically, based on what the needs of the market are. It's just really cool stuff.

Carmen Best:

Can I add one other thing there too, Jen? The other thing that we're seeing is diversity within the providers as well. Since there isn't this big hurdle for doing a large scale RFP or having a huge utility contract to deliver a program, you can really tap into small businesses who are delivering services in addition to targeting those customers in your market.

Jen Szaro:

That's a really good point. I mean it is an easier entry point for a broader group of diverse suppliers. So that really does help our market grow and expand and make our tent bigger too. It's really an exciting point.

Jen Szaro:

So we talked a little bit about what we can do. Where have you faced your biggest challenges? What's holding you back in certain regions maybe or markets? And Marc, I'll start with you.

Marc Romito:

Sure. I think there are a lot of tailwinds. There's not a whole lot I think really holding us as an industry back and ours as a company back, other than time for people to realize just what this opportunity is. So it's like anytime a paradigm has changed or things change, it took a while to understand the impact of high penetration solar on the system. It took a while to understand what a massive amount of wind energy was going to do. It's taking a while to wean away from coal and look to new resources that's now taking gas. So I think that time sort of tells the story of what to expect for challenges in the aggregation world.

Marc Romito:

Right now, a lot of resource planners around the country are really levering natural gas peakers. And that's very interesting as a challenge because it's not a sustainable approach to 100% carbon free that most utilities around the country have taken on. And so there's this ebb and flow of we recognize this finish line we have to get to for the sake of the planet, for the sake of our children and our grandchildren. We know that the current resource mix is changing. We know that the resources that we're seeing needing to be deployed today aren't the ones that are going to be the ones that are going to be around forever. So it's just, I think getting used to being in a changing environment and being loud and excited about some of these other tools to consider.

Marc Romito:

Should you be thinking about a large scale battery, residential batteries, should you be thinking about commercial demand response, should you be thinking about thermostat? The answer is yes, yes, yes, and yes. I think that just takes some patience and some education and it's folks like you guys at AESP and it's conversations like this that increase awareness, that gets the conversation, the debate started and can start to shed some light on what we're trying to tackle together.

Jen Szaro:

Yeah, I really do heartily endorse that all of the above strategy. I mean, you look at what Europe is trying to go through right now with their reduction of oil and natural gas because of what's happening in the Ukraine and they're certainly going to need that, all of the above strategy. And the fact that we now have the capability to tie all of these resources together in an optimal way is just so exciting for the market, I think. And it does need to be all of the above. We do need to be thinking about everything on the table that we can do.

Marc Romito:

And I think, Jen, if I could add one more quick thought, it goes to something that you and Carmen were talking about in terms of transparency. I think there is a challenge for distributed resource aggregators to, even if they understand what problem they're trying to help solve. A lot of times, especially in the vertical market and regulated utilities, a lot of times the resource planning process is relatively closed. It's a sort a black spot and you may all recognize that we're chasing a winter peaking problem or a summer catastrophic nightmare of bunch of outages and there's this heat map or there's window of time everybody can chase. But in the unregulated markets, you're seeing at least visibility into what it's worth. So people know, "Okay, this is what amount of investment is needed to be made in order to make this economic, in order to make it work." So in the vertical space, I would say it's a challenge to get resource planning paradigm a little more transparent, a little more open. That would really, really, really help I think take this to a whole new level.

Jen Szaro:

I agree. I think in these vertical markets, especially in the southeast, it is a challenge to offer innovative solutions because you've got some of those slower moving planning processes that are more rigid. And so just being able to give the flexibility to let the market help you solve some of these problems creatively, I think there's such advantage to that and I would love to see some movement and changes in the markets where that's not currently enabled.

Jen Szaro:

So Carmen, for you, thinking about what you've done thus far with your efforts, is there anything you would have done differently or any mistakes you might have made along the way that you want to share about that maybe we could talk about what you would've done differently in those cases?

Carmen Best:

That's a tough question. I think that the challenges of just being able to help build out this infrastructure that we're trying to build out on the demand side, and it goes all the way down to our homes. As Marc was saying, I think being able to leverage data that we have already invested in, in terms of our energy infrastructure, making sure that we have safe and secure ways to transfer that and aren't getting kind of gummed up in a lot of legal processes around how that can or should be shared. I think there's pathways to be able to do that really efficiently because it is a high value use case to be able to exchange information about where distributed energy resources lie and how they can be optimized. So I think just data visibility up and down the chain is, and building out the infrastructure for data visibility and exchange is really important. I don't know if I'll characterize that as my mistakes that have been made, but it's a continued barrier that exists and I think it's going to require some more work to overcome.

Jen Szaro:

But I think that's a great barrier though that you've really identified there, is we have to give the flexibility and the right market signals too, to make things move more quickly. And in some cases I feel like we've not successfully done that in certain market segments, in certain regions for sure to make this just harder to roll out.

Carmen Best:

I think the other thing is just accepting that change is going to be challenging and if we can all continue to look at change as an opportunity and identify the loss that we might be afraid of so we can really focus on the positive benefits of change, I guess that's where I would put my self reflection on, areas I can continue to improve.

Jen Szaro:

I love that. I think that's such a great way to leave us and that's how I feel too, thinking positively about the change and also helping others think positively about disruption and change.

Jen Szaro:

So Marc, I'm going to give you the last word. So you mentioned, I think it was, you have a better phrase, "don't-care-a-watt's." Thinking about from your perspective and your program, I don't think that's the right phrase you used, but how do you conquer that issue with customers who it's not the first on their minds when they wake up in the morning and get them to participate in these programs and keep them from opting out or keep them engaged?

Marc Romito:

Yeah, that's an important topic. I remember in the utility space there was an adage that we would say that people spend between seven and nine minutes thinking about their utility in a year. And a lot of the times people don't even know who their provider is and certainly don't know how to interpret relatively ambiguous terms. So it's about putting electrical energy usage terms into common vernacular and making it real. I want to want to know how much it cost me to run an air filter in my bedroom. I want to know if I should be running my pool pump this long. I want to know what it would really do for me if I had a little bit more understanding in real-time, not a month after I used it, but in real-time of what is energy about? In our cars, we get miles per gallon and that's drives a lot of behavior of, "Wow, maybe I should get a different car, maybe I should drive differently." There's nothing like that, especially in real-time in homes.

Marc Romito:

And then to say, "Okay, now you're starting to engage people and make them more aware." They can start to make more informed choices and then to target for us and target the masses of underserved people. There are millions of people in this country who just need some education and the truth is, this is the responsibility act. The entire grid exists for one purpose and that is to serve American society and American behavior. That's the whole point. And what people do and how people act and how they live. That's the whole reason why we have electricity generation and to meet people where they are, to make sure that it's affordable, that it's safe, that it's reliable, that it's cyber secure. All these responsibilities are really, really important, but it's got to be digestible.

Marc Romito:

Nobody's selling cars based on really strange information. This is a sexy car, this is a red car, this is a fast car, this car goes faster than the next one. It's a cool gadget. And that's how people think. So I think it's about relevancy and it's about experience and we can talk about programs and how to do aggregations and how to keep people from opting out, but if people are more comfortable and they're saving money, they're going to be happier. So I think it's some common sense and it's treating people like they're people and businesses like their businesses and taking the eyes off of nerdy grid speak for a few minutes and just putting it in dollars and cents and lifestyle terms.

Jen Szaro:

I like that. And what a great way for us to wrap up. This has been a fantastic conversation. Something I'm very excited about and passionate about for our industry. So thank you so much to both of you for joining us today to talk about your perspective efforts in this field to really disrupt our current state and help us move forward. So you've been listening to Carmen Best and Marc Romito and Jen Szaro, and we're going to call it a day. Thanks so much for listening.