Uplight’s Hannah Bascom shares her formula for building, and leveraging, the demand stack
Since her first power sector job with Pacific Gas & Electric, Hannah Bascom knew she wanted to focus on people and clean energy — not on what she calls “the pipes and wires part of the business.”
That interest led her to Nest in early 2014, just a few months after Google had acquired it. Almost a decade later, she moved on to SPAN and then Uplight, a technology partner for energy providers. Today, as Uplight’s chief growth officer, Hannah thinks more than ever about how people interact with energy — and how to better manage that demand.
This week on With Great Power, Hannah talks with Brad about the vital role of demand side management, also known as DSM, for managing load growth, and why she thinks leveraging the demand stack can help utilities to better manage that growth. They also discuss how Puget Sound Energy is using a VPP and rate program to reduce peak demand. And she talks about the important role that rate design can play in encouraging consumers to electrify their homes.
With Great Power is a co-production of GridX and Latitude Studios.
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Credits: Hosted by Brad Langley. Produced by Erin Hardick and Mary Catherine O’Connor. Edited by Anne Bailey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. The Grid X production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and Brad Langley.
Brad Langley: Growing up in rural New Hampshire, Hannah Bascom's parents taught her and her sisters to respect the earth.
Hannah Bascom: My dad had grown up on an organic farm before organic farming was a thing and my parents were composting before it was cool. Just had really good environmental stewardship at our core, growing up.
Brad Langley: Hannah didn't inherit a green thumb, but she did grow up wanting to make a positive impact on the world. So she took a job right out of college working as an analyst for a small education nonprofit in Massachusetts, but within the years she realized she needed to go bigger.
Hannah Bascom: So I was working a lot with our corporate funders and also volunteers, and I pretty quickly came to the conclusion that if I wanted to really ultimately create positive social impact, I had to figure out how to do it vis-a-vis a big company because I saw that those organizations had philanthropic budgets and well-paid employees and also some political clout and all those things.
Brad Langley: So she changed course.
Hannah Bascom: Probably to honestly the surprise of many people who knew me in college. I decided that the best thing to do would be to go to business school to sort of earn my credentials and then go to work at a big company to figure it out.
Brad Langley: And everything was on track until our first week at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. That's when things got crazy.
News clips: Dramatic news coming out of Wall Street. Today, the investment bank, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy this morning brought down by bad mortgage investments. Lehman will be liquidated. The 2008 financial crisis upended everything, and even though Hannah wasn't going into finance, she still felt the impact.
Hannah Bascom: It just felt a little bit like my options were more diminished as a result of the macroeconomic trends.
Brad Langley: But she stuck with grad school and a year into her program, she got an internship with PG&E, and that's when things really started to click for her.
Hannah Bascom: It became pretty clear for me that I cared most about the intersection of people and the climate and clean energy puzzle. I cared a lot less about the pipes and wires part of the business.
Brad Langley: Hannah ended up taking a full-time job at PG&E right out of grad school, working on consumer-facing technologies and communications. A couple years later in 2014, she moved to Nest. This was right after Google had acquired it.
Hannah Bascom: I was the first person that had any kind of utility experience and got to do all the fun startup things, wear lots of different hats, doing partnerships and sales and market development, and just a lot of business scaling stuff too.
Brad Langley: But as Nest scaled, she realized that she missed working in a more nimble environment.
Hannah Bascom: And so there was a certain point in time where it just felt like actually I wasn't leveraging my time and expertise most effectively by being in this organization that didn't value, I guess, the nuances that fill my brain so much about how to scale and have impact with the utility space.
Brad Langley: So in 2023, Hannah joined Uplight, a technology partner for energy providers as the company's chief growth officer, she spends a lot of her time now thinking about meeting customers where they are.
Hannah Bascom: Because that's the thing we forget sometimes. Those of us who are real true energy nerds, I think lose track of the fact that most of us don't spend much time thinking about rates and when different devices are using energy and how we at our homes can participate in these kinds of programs.
Brad Langley: And she's really encouraged by utilities' experimentation with demand side management.
Hannah Bascom: We have to think differently about how we leverage our demand resources. We have to both value and coordinate them in really different ways than we have been so far. Lots of people are paying attention to this space in a way that two years ago they weren't.
Brad Langley: This is With Great Power, a show about the people building the future grid, today. I'm Brad Langley.
Some people say utilities are slow to change, that they don't innovate fast enough. And while it might not always seem like the most cutting-edge industry, there are lots of really smart people working really hard to make the grid cleaner, more reliable and customer-centric.
Today my guest is Hannah Bascom, chief growth officer for Uplight, which sells customer engagement and grid flexibility management solutions. Uplight is a company close to my heart. My first job in the energy sector was with Tendril, which later combined with other startups to form Uplight. Hannah and I talked about the vital role of demand side management, also known as DSM, for managing load growth, and why she thinks leveraging the demand stack can help utilities to better manage that growth. We talked about one example of that, a pilot program that we at GridX collaborated on. To kick off our conversation, I asked Hannah to tell us a bit more about what the demand stack is.
Hannah Bascom: So if you're a utility, you think about the sources of your energy generation in a few different buckets. So you have your base load, which is your nuclear, maybe your coal, you have intermediate load, maybe other kinds of gas or other coal or potentially now batteries. And then you have your peaking resources. And each of those has different cost profiles and characteristics. So the demand stack is the way that utilities are able to bring together their demand resources to basically match the different layers of the supply cake we can call it, right? So you have efficiency programs on the bottom and rates in the middle and then VPPs or demand response at the top. And the thing that I think it's important to note at this moment, as probably your listeners, I spend so much time hearing hair on fire about load growth and kind of confusion around what is a VPP, what does it mean? If we are able to reframe the demand stack as the slices of the DSM pie that we already know and love, it just feels to me like a more reasonable way for us to talk about, okay, how does this actually help us to meet the challenge of load growth in front of us?
Brad Langley: And we kind of break those down: efficiency, rates and VPPs. What are some of the important variables that utilities need to consider when deploying those types of resources or programs?
Hannah Bascom: So today, the dynamic, we'll just take base efficiency programs. The dynamic of most efficiency programs is that there is a cost-effectiveness calculation that honestly probably given what we know about costs of new generation, probably that's too low. But nevertheless, those programs start and stop. They have caps, they're oftentimes promoted in discordant channels such that it's confusing for customers to participate. And so 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. And we know from the programs that Uplight offers, as an example, customers that are highly engaged in our email home energy reports are four times more likely to enroll in a demand response program. So when you do it well, actually, it can be way more cost effective to serve those customers and also of course, much easier to acquire them in various new programs going forward. But it requires a different way from a regulatory perspective too, actually focusing on the customer side of the business.
Brad Langley: I feel all too often, not just utilities, but the customers kind of ignored in this process and they're essential to it. Are you starting to see a shift where utilities are really embracing the customer in this and realizing that they do need the customer to engage to be successful?
Hannah Bascom: Yes, definitely. Utility CEOs are all very wide-eyed because they are coming to a place of, gosh, I don't know how I'm going to meet this load growth. And it feels like the customer DERs are going to have to be a big part of it, and I don't really have any idea how to go about thinking differently about the customer programs that I run and the way that they need to run the grid will also be different. So I would say there's universal awareness that the thing that has gotten us here is not the thing that is going to get us where we need to go.
Brad Langley: So any examples of utilities that you're either working with or you admire in this space that are really embracing the demand stack and the role of the customer in really maximizing the demand stack?
Hannah Bascom: So I will, I'll give a little shout out to PSE. So one of our favorite rate programs that we did with you all at GridX, Brad, showed in the first phase of the pilot phase, customers were 94% favorable and shifting during these peak times. So I would say as they roll out this program to all of their residential customers, they're also thinking about, they also have a VPP with us, which is forecasted to be, I think around megawatts by the end of the summer. So really big multi-asset, multi-class VPP, and both of those things are in pursuit of a legislative mandate actually to reduce peak load in Washington by 10% through demand flexibility. But then also, of course, it's starting to be a much more coordinated program that customers will be able to all participate in their own ways.
Brad Langley: Is there something about the culture or the leadership at Puget Sound Energy that make them be more inclined to do something like this as other utilities think about ways to embrace this kind of thinking? What do you see as some of the core traits that allow a PSE to be really effective and kind of a first mover in this type of work?
Hannah Bascom: That's such a good question. I mean, first of all, the leadership team at PSE is extremely innovative, so that is important, and they really are leaders in this space. But I think also the regulatory piece of it has a substantial impact, right? Utilities are starting to think about and sometimes have good success in aligning their interest with their regulators, but especially now with this pivotal shift where putting a bunch of new assets in rate base is going to max out the cost for consumers, at the end of the day, that's not going to be the primary tool for solving the problem. I would encourage leaders to think about how do you just think differently about the regulatory paradigm such that you can continue to invest in the grid in the way that of course, yes, we need to do for climate adaptation and load growth, but also there's true benefit to the utility business model to lean in on the demand stack side of things because truly is a win-win. If we look at the relative costs for what the business as usual scenario would be.
Brad Langley: With regards to PSE, we talked about the race component a little bit, the VPP, we're seeing a lot more utilities transition to time of use rates across the country and engaging customers and getting them to opt in and be successful in those rates is very important. Any specific lessons learned from that rate engagement effort that you think other utilities might want to take away from?
Hannah Bascom: I think that there is a fear from many utilities and regulators as well that you actually can't just go big from the beginning, but as a Californian, that was just defaulted into a TOU rate. I actually think that's wrong. I think that there is a way to engage customers in TOU rates from the beginning and get better results, but you have to both set up the rate construct as well as the tools for customers to manage. And that means different things to different customers of course, right? Having a Nest thermostat is awesome for customers that want automatic shifting, but not everybody wants that for their house. So making sure that you're reaching customers with the information and in the channels that they need is pretty crucial. But you see at PSE, for example, they have, I think it's like two thirds of their customers are on a TOU rate with a demand charge, I think most of them. And those are the customers that have the highest customer satisfaction. So it's pretty remarkable actually. If you do it intentionally, you can get really good results.
Brad Langley: Ultimately, how much can the demand stack be leveraged to meet load growth?
Hannah Bascom: Ooh, it's such a good question. I was just nerding out on a bunch of industry research reports to try to answer this question for myself. So a lot is the answer. The estimates are that we need about 200 gigawatts of additional peak by 2030. And so you look at the reports that have come out on VPPs and load flexibility. So you've got the liftoff report said 80 to 160 gigawatts. It's possible. 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. VPPs and just core load flexibility get you more than half the way there. As we consider flexibility, we need to divorce ourselves from thinking that, okay, data centers are actually the ones that need the flexibility. Inherently, I think that there might be more appetite to flex other loads in the market as well because we know that there's a ton of both resi and commercial customers that are not in load flexibility programs now.
And so if you shifted the economics for them, it might be more cost effective and beneficial to actually pair that kind of load with a data center load. And that's not something that I've heard enter the narrative a whole lot, but it feels like a pretty interesting thread to pull because there are some data center loads that can flex, but I've also heard a lot of concern that, well, some of them are just a little immovable. I don't think that that has to necessarily be a blocker if you can think creatively about leveraging the overall portfolio of resources on the grid. So anyway, that's the VPP side of things. Then on the rates side of things, there's an LBNL report that said just TOU alone could bring down 1% of peak. And so I actually think that if you pair that with the other kinds of rates that they talk about, you could probably get something like a 5% peak reduction.
So GridX, you got a bright future there, lots more to do. And then on the efficiency side of things, I think that the stat today is something like six gigawatts of peak is just the results of efficiency, which of course is every hour of the day also creating benefit. So anyways, I think I felt better as I start putting together all this math because the hair on fire about how are we going to meet load growth is both justified and probably not as bad as everybody thinks, particularly when you think about the out years, a decade, two decades, three decades, because technology is going to change quite a lot. We're going to get much better at compute. And so I am very optimistic that the doom and gloom scenarios of us not being able to keep up are unfounded.
Brad Langley: But it's lighting the fire and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Hannah Bascom: Correct. I a hundred percent agree. And so we welcome that attention for sure.
Brad Langley: Let's talk about DSM broadly for a second. What's your blue sky vision in terms of where you think utilities can take demand side management into the future?
Hannah Bascom: I think that having coordinated DSM programs, as I mentioned before, is really the panacea. And as a human who lives at a home or a business operator, I think it actually means that you have a more comfortable life, and that your bills are relatively more affordable than they would be otherwise. The version of my parents' efficiency of put on a sweater and we're not turning up the heat, right? That's not the version that we are in now. And there's sort of fundamentally better experiences with new products that are also energy efficient. And as someone who struggled mightily to figure out, should I install a heat pump in my house? Rates, getting back to rates, it's extremely important that we get the rates part of that right. Because it's not inherently cheaper necessarily for you to install a heat pump or get an EV, but I do think that utilities have, particularly on the EV side of things, really gotten smart about that. And so now the next thing is to come up with the right rate design for heat pumps and other home electrification because yeah, you have to encourage, rather than discourage this behavior.
Brad Langley: And just had to get more heat pumps in people's homes, it seems like it's one of those situations where when it breaks, you go fix it. You're not out there actively looking for a solution until you actually need one. So it feels like there's a marketing awareness on heat pumps as well. And then you're right, being able to design rates to optimize those is going to be the next big hurdle to overcome.
Hannah Bascom: Well, and I think historically DSM programs, there's been the efficiency side of things and the load flexibility side of things, and we know of course that many products now are able to do both. And so that's even all the more reason to have this comprehensive approach as you're thinking about customer programs, because 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. So breaking down the traditional silos that have existed in programs is crucial.
Brad Langley: We haven't talked much about Uplight's backstory yet. It's an interesting one. I actually got to see it firsthand as I was running marketing at Tendril for about six years and when this happened, but it was formed through a bunch of mergers starting in 2019, mergers and acquisitions in 2019, and most recently in 2023 when Uplight acquired AutoGrid which is a virtual power plant and DER provider. I guess my question for you is it's not quite a big company, it's not quite a small company. It's kind of a mid-size company right now, but when you look at a strategy like that of bringing multiple different players together, how is it a benefit to the company and to utilities? Is it better buying a best of breed from a single company versus a lot of startups? What do you think is the advantage that kind of approach gives?
Hannah Bascom: Yeah, I think Brad, that actually you and I crossed paths circa 2016 when I was at Nest and you were at Tendril. And it's funny because even though I've only been at Uplight for a couple of years, I've been working with the companies since my Nest days, so I feel like I've been a part of the journey the whole time. So the thesis of bringing together all the companies to form Uplight was that utilities and consumers needed the full end to end solution for customer programs. And that's still very much the vision that exists today. I would say along the way, load flexibility has gotten more sophisticated and more important, which led to the AutoGrid acquisition a little over a year ago. And the other thing that I will say with the platform is that we are specifically designed to be the single pane of glass for utilities to bring together all of the programs and resources that they have.
And so it's why we work so closely with GridX and we can integrate other demand response providers into the platform, but ultimately the goal is to enable the demand stack through having 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 and DSM programs need to be integrated into the core operating systems of the grid, and we're starting to see this now with integrations with various ADMS providers. So we are in the process of integrating with Schneider and GE and OSI at various clients, but the true promise of DERs I think exists at the system level as we just talked about. But when you get down to more of a constrained geography, that's where I think a lot of the value will really be unlocked because gosh, we know 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.
Brad Langley: So last question for you. We call this show With Great Power, which is a nod to the energy industry. It's also a famous Spider-Man quote, with great power comes great responsibility. I know you listened to the show, so you were expecting this. What superpower do you bring to the energy transition?
Hannah Bascom: I see myself as a convener. So as I mentioned, I've been in this space now quite a long time, and I try hard to stay in touch with the people that I have met along the way and make connections because ultimately we need each other to accelerate towards the future. So yeah, for me, it's building bridges between people.
Brad Langley: Awesome. Well, Hannah, thank you very much. So good to have you on the show.
Hannah Bascom: Thanks, Brad. Glad to be here.
Brad Langley: Hannah Bascom is the chief growth officer at Uplight.
With Great Power is produced by GridX in partnership with Latitude Studios. Delivering on our clean energy future is complex. GridX exists to simplify the journey. GridX is the enterprise rate platform that modern utilities rely on to usher in our clean energy future. We design and implement emerging rate structures and we increase consumer investment in clean energy all while managing the complex billing needs of a distributed grid.
Our production team includes Erin Hardick and Mary Catherine O'Connor. Anne Bailey is our senior editor. Steven Lacey is our executive editor, Sean Marquand composed the original theme song and mixed the show. The GridX production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and me, Brad Langley.
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