Advertise on podcast: PLMA: Load Management Dialogues

Launched in January 2024, Con Edison's SmartCharge Commercial Program is the nation's first managed-charging program that harmonizes rapidly growing EV charging demand with local grid constraints, while also creating a meaningful recurring value for customers. To date, this program has achieved 30+% market adoption with 340 enrolled sites representing 90 MW of capacity. Join us to learn how this commercial vehicle program provides a scalable, technology-agnostic template for all utilities to consider.

Join us to learn how SDG&E supported a residential bi-directional EV charger installation coordinated by The Mobility House using a Wallbox Quasar 2 + 2025 Kia EV9. This partnership focused on working through complicated interconnection and permitting processes not originally designed for scaling V2G in the field. Our utility and vendor presenters will share their experiences and lessons learned, including replicable pathways for future residential V2G projects; permitting and interconnection workflows; required utility teams, critical stakeholders, and customer prerequisites; and the common constraints that limit installation eligibility.

In response to Puerto Rico's 2025 heatwave-driven energy emergency, grid operator LUMA integrated Tesla's Powerwall VPP and leveraged home batteries on the island to send power to the grid, providing immediate grid support and avoiding costly new infrastructure and other lengthy permit-requiring alternatives. Their approach benefited significantly from Puerto Rico's increasing rate of solor adoption.

Evergy has tapped Renew Home to help unlock flexible capacity when the grid needs it most – and without asking customers to change their routines or comfort preferences. An evolution of the traditional demand response model that Evergy has successfully employed for 10+ years, the new program prioritizes customers' comfort with subtle, personalized temperature adjustments. Dispatched to tens of thousands of smart thermostats, these small shifts in energy usage added up to over 35 MW of verified peak load reduction during a July 2025 event. In this Load Management Dialogue, Evergy shares how its evolving demand-side toolkit delivers greater flexibility at scale by prioritizing customer comfort.

The electric grid is challenged by growth from many sources, including EVs, but infrastructure upgrades to support fleet charging take time and money to implement while alternatives can be expensive or problematic. This an interactive conversation around a new product designed to address this issue: "Battery-Integrated EV Chargers." You'll learn how battery-integrated EV chargers tackle the need to get fast, reliable power to places the grid was not designed to support and you'll have an opportunity to participate in a Q&A with our panel of industry experts.

Load Management Dialogue: Looking Ahead to 2026 - Trends in Flexible Load ManagementHear from industry experts Jenny Roehm of Schneider Electric and Peter Kelly-Detwiler of NorthBridge Energy Partners as they explore the opportunities and challenges ahead for 2026. These will include demand growth, new data center impacts, the role of EVs, capacity, load flex valuation, and much more! Don’t miss this important first perspective on what’s ahead in the coming year.

PLMA Awards Webinar: CPUC + Energy Solutions on the TECH Clean California Heat Pump Water Heater (HPWH) Program A 2025 PLMA Award of Excellence Winner, TECH Clean California, launched by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), promotes clean heating technologies through incentives for heat pump water heater (HPWH) installations. The program has funded over 15,000 installations resulting in significant greenhouse gas savings. As of October 2023, new mandates required that HPWH customers also enroll in demand response programs. To enable this, the team provided additional education to contractors which has led to high enrollment rates. In December 2024, the contractors were asked to provide “proof of enrollment” for their installations which has continued to enhance program participation and contractor engagement. Today, the HPWH contractors are  evolving into demand response leaders in their own right.

PLMA Awards Webinar: SMUD + DNV for their Telematics-based Residential Managed EV Charging ProgramA 2025 PLMA Award of Excellence Winner, DNV and SMUD excelled in load management through their innovative Residential Managed EV Charging Pilot, which employed a randomized control trial to evaluate solar consumption, system peak reduction, and transformer overload mitigation. With around 1,200 EVs enrolled across four automakers, the interim evaluation revealed an estimated benefit of $60 per vehicle annually. The pilot identified opportunities for performance enhancement by demonstrating the opportunity for auto OEMs to continue investing in load management capabilities that are built into the vehicle, and leveraging existing vehicle telematics as a cost-effective approach for scaling managed EV charging.

A 2025 PLMA Award of Excellence winner, APS marked five years of commitment to 100% clean electricity by 2050 and to date has achieved 54% clean energy. By collaborating with its customers, APS has supported its clean energy goal by operating one of the largest VPPs in North America.  With its VPP, APS can shift load using behind-the-meter resources to achieve predetermined load shapes during flexibility events. Given Arizona’s extreme temperatures, APS plans to continue refining and testing new use cases for dynamic load shaping. With its demand growth increasing to >13,000 MW of energy by 2038, the utility is also committed to building more customer-collaborative VPP solutions to address extreme weather, congestion, renewable generation variability, and rising energy costs.

A 2025 PLMA Award of Excellence winner, BGE has also emerged as a national leader in EV load management with its Smart Charge Management program (SCM), demonstrating significant results through innovative managed charging techniques. As the first managed charging program of its kind to be scaled into a permanent offering, BGE’s SCM serves as a model for distribution-integrated EV load management for utilities nationwide. With high customer satisfaction rates and well-established cost-effectiveness, BGE secured approval from the Maryland Public Utilities Commission to expand its SCM to a permanent program with a target of 30,000 participants by 2027.

In 2023, Apex Analytics conducted research for the Regional Technical Forum (RTF) to characterize the electric vehicle (EV) market. The study’s goal was to assess the EV market, determine “competition” groups, testing methods, data availability, energy efficiency and DR opportunities, with the end goal to determine the potential for the RTF to develop a new efficiency savings measure. The study was focused on personal, light-duty battery EVs. The study identified two approaches to determining EV efficiency but found significant issues with each thereby limiting the potential for developing a measure.

Industry expert, Doug Houseman, joins PLMA for a deep dive into the critical role to be played in the energy industry by Distribution Systems Operators (DSOs). We’ll explore how DSOs enable DERs, and how DSO business models differ from traditional distribution utility models and why, plus we’ll discuss examples of successful DSOs and how they coordinate DER activity via programs and markets. And, we’ll answer your questions, including why it’s critical we increase flexibility on distribution and transmission systems now, as a path to transitioning the U.S. to a DSO model.

Industry experts, Olivia Patterson and Peter Kelly-Detwiler,  joined PLMA to look out over 2025's potential opportunities and challenges ahead, including: 1. A review of our 2024 predictions and what actually happened 2. All about 2025's Growth in Demand driven by AI, data centers, EVs, + + +  3. 2025's expected regional energy issues and opportunities 4. Planning ahead for new capacity, innovations, and pricing constructs 5. The role of Flexible Load Management – short-term buffer or long-term solution? 6. Where and how will all the new money flow?

Learn how Evergy created and implemented a strategic plan to transition 550,000 Missouri residential customers to time-based plans in less than one year's time. Evergy had just six months to develop, test, and implement a highly technical, highly complex, multi-channel digital education initiative and ten months overall to begin converting customers. Partnering with Oracle, their plan, implementation, and results were recognized by the Missouri PSC for setting a new standard for utility time-based plan transitions. Join us to learn how they accomplished this transition, and what lessons and best practices were learned by all, as a result.

In October 2022, the government of Ontario in Canada issued a directive to its Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) to increase investments in energy efficiency and demand management; the lowest-cost ways of meeting system needs. These increased investments enabled additional demand-side management programming, including the "Save on Energy Peak Perks" program. Close coordination between the IESO, service provider EnergyHub, and partners including ecobee and Renew Home (formerly Google Nest) was essential to delivering rapid scale for the Peak Perks program. The result? Ontario IESO built Canada’s largest VPP in just six months with the capacity to deliver a peak demand reduction of up to 90 MW, equivalent to taking a mid-sized Canadian city off the grid during peak times. Join us to learn more about how this program was developed and launched so quickly and effectively, as well as its lessons learned.