Mastering the demand stack: Uplight’s approach to load growth

Faced with a surge of demand, many utilities are planning to spend billions on generation and transmission infrastructure. But Hannah Bascom, chief growth officer at Uplight, doesn’t want them to lose sight of demand flexibility.

“Utility CEOs are all very wide-eyed” about load growth, Bascom explained on the With Great Power podcast. “And it feels like the customer DERs are going to have to be a big part of it.”

Bascom, who joined Uplight in 2023 after stints at Nest and PG&E, argues that a well-coordinated demand stack is essential for utilities grappling with rising demand for the first time in decades.

According to a 2024 Department of Energy report, the United States needs approximately 200 gigawatts of additional peak capacity by 2030 as electricity demand rises and aging fossil fuel plants retire. The DOE report concluded that deploying between 80 and 160 GW of virtual power plants — triple the current scale — could support rapid electrification while reducing overall grid costs by $10 billion annually.

“You’ve got the liftoff report [that] said 80 to 160 gigawatts, it’s possible,” said Bascom. “And then there’s this new report that came out from Duke. They said that with half a percent curtailment, you could add a hundred gigawatts to the grid.”

That Duke University analysis, released in March of this year, introduces the concept of “curtailment-enabled headroom”: the ability to add substantial load to the grid if those loads can be briefly reduced during peak periods. The research suggests balancing authorities could collectively add nearly 100 GW of large loads with minimal impact if those loads are curtailed just 0.5% of the time.

Time-of-use rates could further boost these resources, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which found that time-based rates could bring substantial load reductions. “You could probably get something like a 5% peak reduction,” said Bascom, referencing the research.

“I think I felt better as I started putting together all this math, because the hair-on-fire about [meeting] load growth is both justified and probably not as bad as everybody thinks,” Bascom concluded.

Designing programs in an integrated way

Unlocking this potential requires rethinking how utilities design and implement customer programs. Bascom argues that traditional approaches where efficiency, rate design, and demand response programs operate independently won’t meet today’s challenges.

“The dynamic of most efficiency programs is that there is a cost-effectiveness calculation that’s too low,” she explained. “Those programs start and stop. They have caps, they’re often promoted in discordant channels such that it’s confusing for customers to participate.”

The solution, then, is integration: “You have to start fixing all of that so that those programs are also coordinated with rate programs that are also coordinated with VPP or demand response programs,” she added.

Bascom pointed to Puget Sound Energy as a utility that has successfully implemented this integrated vision. The utility’s time-of-use rate program achieved remarkable results: 94% of participants favorably shifted their energy use during peak times in the pilot phase. Approximately two-thirds of PSE’s customers are on time-of-use rates with demand charges, and these customers report the highest satisfaction levels.

Simultaneously, PSE is deploying a multi-asset virtual power plant expected to provide significant flexible capacity. Both initiatives support Washington state’s mandate to reduce peak load by 10% through demand flexibility.

What makes PSE different? “The leadership team at PSE is extremely innovative,” Bascom said. “But I also think the regulatory piece has a substantial impact.”

From program integration to system integration

While other utilities have focused on electric vehicle rate structures, Bascom believes the next frontier is developing similar innovative approaches for other electrification technologies.

“It’s not inherently cheaper necessarily for you to install a heat pump or get an EV,” she noted, “but I do think that utilities have, particularly on the EV side of things, really gotten smart. And so now the next thing is to come up with the right rate design for heat pumps and other home electrification.”

Bascom’s team at Uplight is focused on technology convergence. As devices increasingly serve dual purposes — delivering both efficiency and flexibility — the traditional program boundaries become obsolete. A water heater isn’t just an efficiency opportunity or a demand response asset; it’s both simultaneously.

“Breaking down the traditional silos that have existed in programs is crucial,” she said. “A customer who’s replacing their water heater, you want to make sure that it is a load flexible enabled one, and that you get them right away enrolled in those programs.”

Bascom is working on integrating these demand-side resources into the core operating systems of the electric grid. Uplight’s platform approach aims to provide utilities with a “single pane of glass” to manage all customer programs and resources.

“The goal is to enable the demand stack through having a unified view into what programs exist for your customers, what are the megawatts under management or megawatt-hours under management, and then what’s the customer view to forecast and respond as grid congestion comes up,” she explained.

Bascom sees promising opportunities at the local distribution level, where demand-side management can offset expensive upgrades.

“When you get down to more of a constrained geography, that’s where I think a lot of the value will really be unlocked,” she said. “Transformer replacements are not easy to come by, and also they’re expensive. So we have to think just how to, at a more local level, run the grid in a different way.”

For the full conversation with Hannah Bascom, listen to her interview on season 5 of With Great Power here.

With Great Power is a show about the people building the future grid, today. It’s a co-production of GridX and Latitude Studios. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get your shows.

Read the original article from Latitude Media here.