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Talk about systems and solutions is everywhere across the utility sector, but the biggest challenges the grid is facing are more about coordination than hardware. As utilities, retail suppliers, and operators all compete to manage the same DERs like electric vehicles, solar infrastructure, and smart appliances, the biggest challenges are associated with alignment, timing and expectations on every side. 

Michael Grasso, CEO and founder of GridRails, has a keen awareness of these challenges. His decades of experience in the industry has exposed him to teams and processes that have become paralyzed by fragmented tech silos and sluggish financial settlement cycles that take anywhere from 30 to 120 days to resolve. That's why his company is working to solve these challenges by introducing an agnostic, software-as-a-service (SaaS) orchestration layer that unifies these fragmented endpoints into a single platform, giving energy suppliers direct control over their network operations.

We caught up with him to explore why his platform structures its solution around three core pillars, what it means for consumers to receive instant financial gratification in a digital wallet for adjusting their energy usage in the moment, the importance of shifting the utility paradigm from a penalty-based framework to a real-time incentive model, and much more.

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