Electron has just joined two different Clean Fight cohorts in New York: one focused on energy storage (Deploy Now), the other on international companies working across the built environment (International Landing Pad). On paper, they’re aimed at different problems. In practice, we ended up in both for the same reason. I want to talk about why, because I think it applies beyond New York.
Every grid under pressure faces the same choice between build more, or get more out of what’s already there. Both are legitimate tools, and most grids need both at once.
New York is a good test bed for build-and-flex
New York is a good illustration for that choice. It’s home to some of the busiest airports in the world and some of the most densely populated areas in the country. There’s a lot of latent flexibility sitting across both.
JFK airport, for instance, sits in one of the tightest parts of the city’s grid, where upgrading capacity fast enough is a real challenge for the local utility. It’s a live pressure point, in one of the most complex, highest-value pieces of infrastructure in the country.
Reinforcement there is going to take time no matter what, which is why getting more from what’s already built matters in the meantime.
But “get more from what’s already built” and “build more” are two tools, and the job is knowing which one to reach for, and when.
Markets can help utilities make the right investment decision
This is where flexibility markets and programs can step in. Running a flex market can extract value from existing assets and also produce the evidence for whether flex was ever going to be enough in a given case.
If the volume or value of available flexibility is high, that’s a real, cost-effective alternative to reinforcement. If it isn’t, that’s a useful answer too: it tells a utility, with evidence, that reinforcement is the right call.
Either way, someone’s made a better-informed decision than they could have without running the market at all.
That’s Electron’s role in Clean Fight, as I see it: helping utilities and asset owners get evidence-based, cost-prudent answers about what to do, including how much of the answer is DERs, and how much is new build. We’re here to level the playing field so both options actually get compared on their merits.
We’re not a battery company, and we don’t build the technology at the centre of most of these programs. What we do is sit on top of it, with our market and program operations platform, helping whoever owns an asset get more usable value out of it.
That’s turned out to be useful in both the storage-focused cohort and in a much broader one covering heating, cooling, and building intelligence, because the underlying problem is the same either way.
Essentially, there’s a lot of distributed energy sitting on the grid right now that’s only doing as much as it’s currently being asked to, and not much more.
But there are ways to change that.
1. Existing assets can do more, if there’s a reason to
I’ve spotted recurring themes across different types of asset owners: solar, batteries, EV chargepoints, and other distributed resources often get installed to do one specific job, then sit there doing that one thing and nothing else.
A battery installed to shave a handful of peak-demand hours a year is usually capable of far more than that, technically. A way for the owner to get paid for that extra capability is missing; there’s often no market or program that rewards it yet.
That’s why the bigger opportunity usually is about building the missing route to market, so what already exists can start earning for the things it’s already capable of doing, rather than installing more and more tech.
There are plenty of examples of this already, in New York and further afield. Existing programs reward existing DERs today, but often for a small fraction of what those assets could actually do. Closing that gap means planning and operations working from the same view of the grid, rather than in silos.
2. Flexibility buys time while reinforcement catches up
That missing route to market matters for a second reason. In places like the ones I mentioned above, flexible resources can act as a faster, cheaper way to relieve pressure on the parts of the grid under the most strain, buying time while the physical build catches up.
But that only works if there’s also a credible way to prove to a regulator that the flexibility is real, additive, and not being counted twice.
This ends up being a market and measurement problem. It means building the mechanism that pays for flexibility, and the proof that feeds back into the reinforcement decision itself, by showing how much of the gap flexibility can close before deciding how much needs to be built.
3. Opening up to smaller, less conventional assets promotes equity
Some of this works better if it stops limiting participation to whoever can already afford to buy into it.
In the UK, we’ve spent a lot of time lowering the barrier to entry, so that it isn’t just the households who already own a nice home, an electric car, and a battery who get to make money from their own energy use.
The right approach is agnostic to both the type of technology and the size of the asset, so it doesn’t solely reward households that can already afford a large, conventional setup.
Lower and middle-income households are more likely to have smaller-scale or less conventional assets, if they have any at all. Opening up routes to market for those types and sizes is what actually lets them participate and earn from their own energy use, rather than being priced out from the start.
4. The biggest, most complex loads can hold a lot of untapped value
Low-income households aren’t the only ones that may be missing out. A lot of the public conversation about distributed energy resources is still shaped around the home and residential assets: rooftop solar, home batteries, EVs on the driveway.
That skips over a much bigger category: large, non-residential infrastructure (i.e. transit systems, ports, big campuses) sitting on complex loads that don’t fit into a consumer-style program. JFK, mentioned earlier, is a good example of a huge, complex load that sits outside residential programs.
These operators often control far more capacity than a single household, but because their load doesn’t match an existing category, most of it never gets offered as flexibility at all.
It’s the same barrier as the affordability point above, just popping up in a different place: the routes to market were mostly built around a few conventional asset types, and anything that doesn’t look like them ends up on the outside as untapped value.
5. Generation competes on value, why shouldn’t distributed energy?
At a transmission level, the grid mostly doesn’t care whether the power came from a gas turbine or a nuclear plant. It gets dispatched through a competitive market on its merits.
At the distribution level, that logic tends to disappear. Every type of distributed resource ends up in its own bespoke program, judged on its own terms, instead of competing in a shared market on the value it can offer.
Bringing that same neutral, market-based logic downstream – so a battery, a smart thermostat, and a fleet of EVs can all compete on value rather than sitting in separate silos – is, to me, one of the biggest opportunities.
6. Getting coordination right is key
What makes coordination hard is that those silos show up wherever you look in the energy system.
Some of the most promising opportunities we’ve come across involve assets that span more than one authority or jurisdiction. Figuring out who’s responsible and getting the right people to talk to each other is harder than getting the tech right.
We also learned in the UK that treating planning and operations as two separate functions doesn’t work.
The distribution network operator and the distribution system operator are extensions of each other, working towards the same thing: a reliable, affordable grid. The network operator side has the traditional job of building and maintaining the physical network. The system operator side is what that job has to become as more DERs connect – actively coordinating all of it in real time.
If they run as completely separate functions, that’s the same silo problem as the one between authorities, just at an organisational level.
A market can break these silos down. It doesn’t care which authority owns an asset, or whether it sits under planning or operations. It just prices the value on offer and lets whoever can act on it act.
That’s why we ended up applying to two Clean Fight programs rather than one. The technology and asset types are different, but the underlying opportunity – and the silos standing in front of it – are the same in both.
And in each case, the more evidence a market produces, the easier it becomes to weigh flexibility fairly against reinforcement. None of it argues against building new infrastructure. It argues for knowing, with evidence, when you actually need to.
