Clarum Advisors
As a Director with Clarum Advisors, Molly Podolefsky leverages her experience in economics, decarbonization, corporate sustainability, corporate finance, and the power and utilities sector to help innovative, clean tech companies.
Peter Asmus is President of Pathfinder Communications and has been informing and shaping energy markets for almost forty years. A journalist, analyst, book author and consultant, he specializes in tracking global trends in virtual power plants, microgrids and data centers. He is also a Senior Advisor with Clarum Advisors.
Imagine being tasked with identifying and categorizing all the software solutions and tools used to manage behind-the-meter (BTM) and front-of-the-meter (FTM) distributed energy resources (DERs) today versus a decade ago.
Your modern-day self — at least without the help of AI — would face a more challenging assignment given the proliferation of load management solutions since 2015. However, the sheer volume of software solutions available would pose less of a challenge than classifying them by type.
Grid distributed energy resource management systems (DERMS), grid-edge DERMS and virtual power plants (VPPs) would emerge as broad categories, but the boundaries between them are increasingly blurred, reflecting the overlapping functionality these solutions share today.
This has not always been the case. While VPPs, utility DERMS, and grid-edge DER orchestration platforms arose as related but distinct, they are converging. This article explores how and why the lines separating these solutions are disappearing, what a future steady state might look like, and what this means for utility investments in load flexibility.