We all know the challenges facing the grid, so I’ll skip the part about increasing demand, data centers, and aging infrastructure. Instead, I’d like to focus on another challenge: managing home energy usage with increasing costs is only becoming more complicated. We’ve built important customer energy programs across the industry, but now we need a dramatic increase in participation, scale and reliability, to meet the moment.

Luckily, we already have the tools today to address the challenges at hand. We can empower customers to take charge of their energy use. Automated and personalized energy adjustments make it easy for customers to save and shift energy use when it matters most, which means they can also use cleaner, cheaper energy and support a more dynamic grid. And when we make it simple, we can help millions of households, which means those customer savings and grid impacts can really add up.

Customers don’t have time to learn the nuances of the energy industry

Recently, my kids and I visited a car museum and they asked me why the earliest models looked like horse carriages. As we know, the first horseless carriages were built by the same industry accustomed to building regular horse-drawn carriages. We’ve seen a similar phenomenon in the energy industry. Early Demand Response (DR) programs simply shut off customers’ A/C compressors during peak hours because that was the only tool available. Like cars and carriages, early smart thermostat DR looked very similar to load switch DR — but it didn’t need to.

While both vehicles and DR have evolved, we’re still often trying to form customer-focused programs into an energy-industry shaped mold. Those of us in the industry understand the nuanced differences between energy efficiency, demand response, time of use, and clean energy programs. Unfortunately, each topic sounds the same to busy customers, and they don’t want to think about signing up for separate offerings.

Luckily, we can manage the complexity and make it easy for them to take control.

When we each do a little, it adds up to a lot

To help customers save and shift energy use when it matters most, and to reach impactful scale, we need to do a few things really well:

1. Personalization: DR programs are a longstanding piece of utility portfolios and will continue to play an important role. But one-size-fits-all programs have a natural ceiling of participation, and there are signs we’re beginning to reach it. The future of energy management looks different: virtual power plants that are more comfortable and more personalized. There’s big power in small changes.

   We are now able to increasingly customize experiences based on weather, time of use rate details, grid congestion, housing and device structure, and personal preferences. By meeting individual households where they are, energy providers can greatly increase participation in energy programs that help customers stay comfortable and save. This means more scale, and a more reliable, firm resource energy providers can rely on.

2. Simple participation and controls: In product development, this topic is easy to talk about, and challenging to execute. We have to make it simple and intuitive to enable the right energy features for the right customers at the right time. For some, this is during the setup of a new smart device. But for others, who may have called in a Pro for installation, the right moment may be during the first few days of usage.

   And no matter what, we’re guaranteed to lose most people if we ask them to dig around for an account number or move through other onerous hoops just to turn on energy management features.

3. Clear benefits: Consumers want to understand how their energy-saving actions make a difference, so we have to consistently provide evidence of the value our features and services are providing. We need to make it easy for them to see how much they’ve saved or earned, how they and their community have made a positive impact, and what they can expect next. 

We’ve already found that when we make it simple for consumers to turn on energy management features, participation soars. At Renew Home, 3 in 4 new customers are turning on Nest Renew and Energy Shifts when they set up their Nest thermostats. And there is still so much more that we can all do.

The next era of home energy management will also be the era of scale. And by helping customers save when it matters most, that scale will also usher in a new era of support for the more dynamic energy grid we so desperately need.

It all starts with savings, and it all starts at home.