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.

Hear 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. 

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.

A 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.

It has been a wild and wooly year for managing residential demand response programs. In addition to normal program management we have had the additional challenges of our customers and ourselves having to shelter-in-place, as well as the difficulty predicting changes in customer behavior this new normal brings. 

Join the Customer Engagement Interest Group to learn more about challenges your utility peers have faced and some of the approaches they have taken to keep their programs fully subscribed and delivering results while customers’ homes are more fully occupied. Length: 59:11.