Edison Foundation
Neil Veilleux is Senior Director Market Development at Uplight.
More than a dozen thought leaders and decision makers took the stage at the Edison Foundation's Institute for Electric Innovation's 13th annual Powering the People event in Washington D.C. Enjoy these excerpts.
Neil Veilleux: To capitalize on that opportunity, three things need to come together. That's technology, markets, and policy, and then customer engagement, a good customer experience. On that technology side, we arguably have everything we need.
Digitization of the grid has been happening for a number of years. We've got smart meters, smart thermostats, and smart DERs. We certainly need better, smoother access to data from those smart devices, but the pieces are in place and there're a lot of smart innovators at Uplight and elsewhere that are working to solve those problems.
On markets and policy, which is what I hold near and dear to my heart, there's a lot of work to be done. There're just problems all over the market as we're trying to figure out how to structure programs or policies to make demand flexibility work in the residential sector.