Paul Wezner, Chief Product and Customer Officer at Powerley, is a speaker at the 2025 Smart Energy Summit, co-located with DISTRIBUTECH, taking place March 25–26.

Below, Paul shares his insights on grid management and adoption of energy management solutions in the current consumer energy market.

How have consumer behaviors changed in adopting more (or less) energy management solutions and why?
Most traditional utilities are now providing a basic level of information to their customers, including energy usage presentment, disaggregation, and some generic coaching or ways customers can save, which is a significant improvement in the baseline over 10 years ago, when most customers got no insights beyond their bill. Progressive utilities are attempting to provide greater insights to customers, proactively notifying them about upcoming high bills, leveraging real-time data and alerts to provide just-in-time coaching, calculating which rates are the best for customers and how they can optimize their usage based on their rate, and leveraging artificial intelligence to provide more personalized insights and recommendations.

What partnerships are driving the adoption of energy management solutions, and what barriers remain?
The most important partnerships that can happen today when looking at optimizing management of the grid are across the utilities and energy providers, end-use technology providers like thermostat manufacturers, automotive OEM’s and data center companies, and the vendors that provide services and functionality to moderate the grid. Each entity has its own core objectives between profitability and grid stability, but all three need to work in cooperation with each other to ensure that stability.

How can energy providers balance grid reliability, sustainability goals, and cost efficiency while keeping consumers engaged?
A part of this will happen naturally — as prices continue to rise, consumer engagement (for better or worse) is going to happen because people will gravitate toward managing the things that hit their pockets the most, and energy will increasingly take up a greater share of the customer’s wallet. But the other part must come from utilities and energy providers continuing to innovate to provide better solutions to customers, keeping up in pace with other service providers across industries where utilities have lagged behind.

Join Paul and other industry leaders during the 16^TH annual Smart Energy Summit, co-located with DISTRIBUTECH in Dallas, TX. Register here.