July 24, 2023
The Leap Team
Leap’s partner EnergyHub works with over 60 utilities across North America to manage more than one million distributed energy resources (DERs) like smart thermostats, electric vehicles (EVs) and charging equipment, energy storage systems, solar inverters and water heaters. We chatted with EnergyHub’s Director of Market Development Brady Klein about his experience managing the company’s energy market activities, partnering with Leap and navigating the ever-evolving grid-edge sector.
Q: How would you describe EnergyHub’s role in the energy transition?
A: At EnergyHub, our mission is to keep the grid running reliably while enabling more renewable energy and reducing reliance on fossil fuel. In 2022 – the fifth warmest year on record – EnergyHub worked with client utilities and their customers to manage 1.3 GW of flexibility, reducing grid load and keeping the power supply reliable at critical times. To put that in perspective for aspiring energy nerds, that’s nearly a third more capacity than the 1 GW of electricity produced by an average-sized nuclear plant.
We also operate wholesale market virtual power plants (VPPs) and bid DER resources into energy markets, which is where our partnership with Leap comes in.
Q: Why did EnergyHub decide to partner with Leap to expand its grid services footprint?
A: EnergyHub provides its Distributed Energy Resource Management System (DERMS) platform and program services to over 60 electric and gas utilities across North America. Many of these utilities rely on turnkey demand-side management (DSM) portfolio implementation, often through a single vendor, to achieve their energy savings targets. However, several key states like California, Texas and New York have more competitive demand response (DR) frameworks that diverge from the conventional DSM landscape. In these regions, and wherever utilities lack the incentives or economic value drivers to launch DER/DR programs, Leap acts as a powerful conduit for EnergyHub to monetize the devices within our DER partner ecosystem.
Despite our competitive positioning in certain markets, Leap has been a valuable partner to EnergyHub in evaluating new market products and delivering new grid services capabilities that stack value above and beyond conventional capacity market-oriented demand response.
Leap is more than just an interface to the market, but a support system with the ability to dedicate marketing resources and strategic thinking that is tremendously helpful in an industry where wholesale market DR aggregation has become somewhat commoditized.
Q: What are the greatest challenges you face managing EnergyHub's energy market participation?
A: Dispatching in response to energy market awards or grid contingencies is increasingly unpredictable with respect to the time of day, frequency and duration of load reduction required. For example, market evolution in Texas means dispatches last as long as eight hours, while the trend toward winter peaking activity in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic means that demand-side resources will need to serve the grid at different times than we’re used to.
As a result, even with sophisticated modeling, predicting the performance of a large aggregation of grid-edge DERs and baking that into your bidding strategy is getting more complicated by the day. Mitigating shortfall risk is a challenge that we all face in providing grid reliability in uncertain conditions.
I’m excited about the progress EnergyHub has made around load and capacity forecasting, and our ability to accurately predict the load shed capability of a given resource. Leap and our utility partners will greatly benefit from these advanced modeling techniques built on many years of DR program delivery and many billions of device-level data points.
Q: What do you see as a significant challenge facing the industry as a whole?
A: The slowness with which modern data architectures and the data engineer/data science disciplines have permeated the electric utility industry. Many utilities have built up analytics teams for the first time, but the vastness of the data that distribution utilities will have at their disposal as they progress through grid modernization is staggering, and I don’t think there’s nearly enough emphasis on extracting insights and infusing those insights across the enterprise.
Systems integration projects and consultants won’t cut it - utilities need robust in-house data science teams if we’re going to quickly advance integrated resource planning, demand-side management, EV make-ready, energy supply and forecasting and all other utility functions.
Q: What has surprised you most in your grid-edge career so far?
A: I’m still shocked at how quickly the world’s largest automakers went from electrification skeptics to announcing new platforms and dozens of EV models within the span of two or three years. It’s pretty inspiring - I like to think about what auto manufacturers are doing that we can learn from in the utilities industry.
Q: Are there any DERs you are particularly excited about working with in the future?
A: Residential vehicle-to-home (V2H) is such an exciting product to have in the home electrification bundle. Assuming we can produce the controllers and infrastructure at the right price point and package up customer financing in a seamless way, I’m incredibly curious to see how the residential battery industry fares against the automakers in the “battle for the garage.” I can see a world where an EV is the only DER a customer really needs for resilience and cost savings.
Q: What’s next for EnergyHub’s DERMS platform? What are your goals for your grid services offerings?
A: EnergyHub's DERMS platform has three main priorities for the near future: scale, reliability and EVs.
Scale: We aim to achieve a significant scale of 2GW of flexibility under management across all clients and programs, expand our partner ecosystem and launch programs faster.
Reliability: EnergyHub is working on improving capacity and load forecasting, enhancing reporting functionality, and obtaining SOC II certifications to ensure data security.
EVs: EnergyHub is adding more EV integrations with partners to drive customer program participation. We are also rolling out a new driver app to engage customers effectively and capture their preferences for optimized charging.
