Gisela Glandt is vice president of virtual power plants at Uplight, a provider of utility demand management solutions.
Load growth is back, and it isn't slowing down. Electrification, data centers and extreme weather are pushing utilities to find flexible capacity faster than they can build it. Demand-side programs including demand response, virtual power plants, time-varying rates and energy efficiency are one of the few levers that scale quickly and cost-effectively — yet the industry keeps hitting the same wall.
Roughly 80% of customers say they want help managing their energy, but utilities are still seeing enrollment in demand management programs around 10% — despite larger incentives, more innovative technology, and more targeted marketing. What if the problem isn't the customers and instead is the process of asking them to raise their hand?
Opt-in utility program enrollment puts the burden on the customer: to understand the program, check to see if they are eligible, decide it's worth it, and then take action. The benefits and incentives can show up months down the road, and they may even forget about them. Most people don’t make it past enrollment and it’s not because of lack of interest. It simply involves too many steps and too much brain power.
The industry is shifting from programs customers must join to flexibility that's already embedded as a default or activated at the point of sale of a device, with no enrollment required. Where utilities have made this shift, customer participation climbs from 10% into the 70% to 100% range. One Midwestern utility that restructured a program from opt-in to opt-out scaled capacity four to five times faster — and had 70% to 80% of customers participate.
The customer remains in control
“Opt-out" can be translated as "no choice,” and that couldn’t be further from the truth. A well-designed built-in flexibility program ensures that the customer stays in control. Instead of asking everyone to opt in to participate, it lets anyone choose not to participate at any time, with control that's visible, immediate, and intuitively easy. However, default programs only work when customers are really in control.
- Program managers must make the program transparent: Tell customers clearly and early that they're enrolled, what it means and how to change it.
- Customer control must be frictionless: The opt-out has to be as easy as the opt-in was, with self-service tools and clear preferences.
- And programs must show tangible benefits: Connect participation to outcomes customers actually care about: lower bills, a more reliable grid, and a more resilient community.
Behavioral demand response programs cast the broadest net with no hardware required, no cost of entry, and are open to nearly every energy customer. That's what makes it the most equitable and accessible path in: it reaches the renters and non-device-owners that automated demand response leaves out.
Device manufacturer-based programs work the other angle, unlocking capacity that's already installed and sitting idle: smart thermostats, connected water heaters, electric vehicles and batteries not yet enrolled in anything. When enrollment happens by default at device setup — through OEM partnerships rather than a separate utility sign-up — that latent capacity becomes dispatchable. The shifts are smaller and steadier than a typical demand response event, but can have even greater impact as participation scales exponentially.
For both types of programs, customers have the option to participate and receive benefits, and there are no consequences if they opt out of a particular event or day.
Participation in demand-management programs is an affordability strategy. Every home added to a utility’s flexible base expands the pool of dispatchable megawatts — and the more flexibility utilities can call on, the more generation they can defer or avoid. Deferred capital is downward pressure on rates. With affordability under scrutiny from regulators and customers alike, participation stops being a program metric and becomes an affordability lever.
A low-friction entry program can be an on-ramp for higher value programs. Customers who join a behavioral or OEM-based demand response program are now more informed and better targets for automated demand response, time-varying rates, managed EV charging, energy efficiency and other programs.
The utilities that redesign enrollment around how customers actually behave, with effortless enrollment and complete customer control, will be the ones that close the participation gap. Reliability and affordability increasingly depend on getting this right, with energy customers seeing the most immediate benefits.
