Powering the People
Edison Foundation
Excerpts of remarks from the Institute for Electric Innovation’s Powering the People annual conference.
Fortnightly Magazine - January 2024
Powering the People: D.C. Commission
Edison Foundation
“Looking forward, we know we can’t rely solely on utility discount programs to ensure affordability for our ratepayers. We have to look at ways to ensure that the energy that’s being procured is being done in an inexpensive manner, as well as that we are reducing overall usage.”
Powering the People: DTE Energy
Edison Foundation
“We’re pivoting our model and taking a broader approach to say, where can we have a dedicated low-income team that is not just helping when someone has a problem with bills but is there when they are onboarding and when they’re setting up their service to get a better sense of what the profile is of that user.”
Powering the People: Oracle
Edison Foundation
“We’re normalizing it by letting folks know how many people in their area, territory, zip code, are participating in programs. We’re letting them know it’s normal in their neighborhood, giving them exact data, so folks understand it’s not only those folks who are that check away from poverty, but a lot are going in and out of these programs over time.”
Powering the People: Fortis
Edison Foundation
“It’s not about flattening the load; it’s about shaping the load to match your resources. This is weird, so it’s not resources following load, necessarily, there’s still a lot of that going on, but this is also a conversation about load following resources. That’s how this has changed.”
Powering the People: Southern Company
Edison Foundation
“We’re putting demand-side resources on a more equal playing field. That’s an evolution that we’ve not done with such advanced modeling before.”
Powering the People: Uplight
Edison Foundation
“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.”
Powering the People: Bidgely
Edison Foundation
“You have to start with a small win before your utility will trust larger things with AI, but utilities aren’t going to be able to deliver clean energy in a scalable, cost-effective, reliable way without AI.”
Powering the People: IBM
Edison Foundation
“Most people don’t understand that there’s a big difference between AI and Generative AI. Generative AI is not equal to AI, necessarily. I’ve been kind of laughing at the fact that with the advent of OpenAI, there has been a lot more interest in good old AI, as I like to call it, of the traditional predictive forecasting.”
Powering the People: AES Corporation
Edison Foundation
“The idea is that you can’t go and make a wholesale change of all that infrastructure, without figuring out how to run your business more effectively and efficiently. In all those areas, we’re using AI to help us drive that transformation and help us better inform where we’re going.”