Drew Smith is Electron’s Strategic Business Development Manager. He came to the energy sector 10 years ago and has since worked across commercial solar, battery storage, and utility Distributed Energy Resource Management Systems (DERMS). We sat down with him to talk about what brought him to Electron, where the industry keeps getting stuck, and where the opportunities lie for utilities today.
Tell us a bit about your journey into energy and distributed systems.
I started my career in banking, and after a number of years I started to reflect on what was important to me. I grew up in New Orleans, a city built below sea level and in the path of a lot of storms. Ensuring the survival of cities like that, and of communities elsewhere that are exposed to climate risk, felt like the thing that genuinely mattered to me.
I went back to school and got a master’s in public policy with an energy and environmental focus, because I believed and still believe that renewable energy is the clearest path toward a better climate outcome.
That led me to work for a commercial and industrial solar installer, then to a battery energy storage integrator, and eventually to my first utility-facing distributed energy role, working in the DERMS space for Mitsubishi Electric Power Products. That’s where I really started to understand that the challenge is about putting energy on the grid in a way that works both technically and from a value standpoint.
What stood out to you about Electron’s approach?
Coming from the DERMS world, I’ve seen how the utility industry is rightly grounded in the physics of the grid. Ensuring electrons flow correctly, get to where they’re going, when they need to be there: that’s been the focus for a hundred years. But as the flow of those electrons has evolved a bit, I think utilities have been reluctant to move beyond that model.
What attracted me to Electron is that it’s a company grounded in the physics, but also one that brings the value and policy dimensions into the picture too.
It helps create a path for utilities to work in a different way, by enhancing what they already do. The focus is on coordinating how new resources exist within the infrastructure utilities are already used to. That felt like a meaningful and achievable way to drive change.
The industry has talked about DERMS for years. From your experience, what has been harder than people expected when it comes to actually deploying these systems?
The typical path for utilities is to first implement Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS): pulling together their outage management systems, distribution management systems, and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) into a single platform. That process takes many years.
DERMS deployment follows from there. So, by the time you’re talking about real-world DERMS rollout, you’re often looking at five to ten years of groundwork first.
To get around some of the timing issues utilities run pilots with a technical framing i.e. “let’s run an electric vehicle control pilot, a vehicle-to-grid pilot, a flexible interaction trial”. When utilities review the results, they struggle to see the impact.
That’s because nobody started by asking where on the network this capacity was actually needed, or what it would be worth to have it there. The technical deployment came before anyone had clearly articulated why it needed to happen and what it needed to deliver. You end up putting the cart before the horse.
DERMS systems work, so the problem is about approaching deployment as a technical exercise. The thing that’s really needed is an economic and operational case that gives the whole approach direction.
You’ve talked about the gap between what utilities want from DERs and what’s actually achievable. Where does that gap come from?
Utilities are built around the ability to call on assets instantaneously. You lose a feeder, and your system needs to isolate it in sub-seconds. That instinct for direct, reliable control is rational given how the grid has operated historically.
But when you move to customer-side assets, that level of control isn’t really available. You can’t guarantee that a customer won’t override a control signal when they need. That’s mainly due to a lack of connection between the customers actions and the value the customer receives from participating. So these programs tend to get siloed within utilities, managed by customer teams that operate separately from the operational side.
The problem with that separation is that it leaves a lot of value on the table. Capacity is an operational concern. If you can use market-based mechanisms to reserve capacity from these distributed assets, you’re doing something genuinely useful for grid operations without requiring the kind of direct control that simply isn’t feasible at the customer level.
That’s the space Electron’s ElectronConnect platform addresses. It helps operators see there’s a credible, valuable way to make use of these resources without asking them to abandon everything they know about how grids work.
There’s also a customer relationship dimension worth acknowledging. The utility sector has historically operated on a command-and-control basis whereby customers receive a bill, and that’s the extent of the interaction. When customers are brought into the process through demand response, made to feel like participants rather than passive recipients, it changes the dynamic for the better.
Where do you think the biggest opportunities lie for utilities to start making progress today?
I think the biggest opportunity is on the planning side, connecting where things are going with how things work today. That means focusing on the value these new asset types can provide, and making that case clearly rather than assuming it’s self-evident.
One of the ongoing problems with pilots is that even a successful trial in one part of a network doesn’t necessarily translate elsewhere. Every part of a grid is different. Some areas are meshed, some are radial. What works in one location won’t necessarily scale. So the industry needs to find ways to move past pilots and think about how to demonstrate value at a network-wide level.
There’s a real tension in the sector right now between the “fail fast” model that’s become fashionable in technology circles, and the operational reality that grid operators simply cannot afford to fail.
Bridging that gap requires showing value in a way that doesn’t put operational reliability at risk. That’s what Electron‘s approach aims to do – demonstrating what these programs or markets can deliver so operators can build the confidence they need to scale up from there.
