Derapi had the opportunity to attend and speak at the PLMA Spring Conference, bringing together utilities, aggregators, OEMs, consultants, and technology leaders to discuss the future of distributed energy programs, grid flexibility, and virtual power plants (VPPs).
Across the conference, one theme emerged consistently: load flexibility is entering a new phase of maturity.
The conversation is no longer centered on whether distributed energy resources can play a meaningful role on the grid. Increasingly, utilities and industry players are focused on a harder question: how to scale these resources across a fragmented ecosystem of devices, vendors, utility requirements, market mechanisms, and program structures without creating unnecessary complexity while being used consistently and cost-effectively.
That shift reflects the reality utilities are facing today. Electrification is accelerating, load is growing, infrastructure is aging, and data center expansion is placing new pressure on local grids. At the same time, utilities are being asked to improve reliability and resilience while managing affordability.
In this environment, distributed energy resources are no longer viewed as only experimental technologies or innovation pilots. They are becoming operational tools that utilities are actively working to integrate into planning, programs and grid operations.
That evolution is also expanding the conversation beyond traditional emergency-based demand response using a limited range of devices into a broader set of use cases that spans peak shaving, distribution congestion management, and resource adequacy, using devices spanning battery storage, electric vehicles, heating and cooling, and other flexible loads.
But as the conversation at PLMA made clear, many of the most important challenges to scaling load flexibility are not purely technical.
How should flexibility be valued fairly and adequately? How can control room operators build confidence in calling on distributed resources? What will it take for regulators and utilities to recognize flexibility as accredited capacity? And how can programs motivate individual customers to participate?
The consensus was that addressing these challenges requires dialogue with a much broader set of stakeholders: technologists, utility leaders, distribution operations engineers, regulators, legislators, customer advocates, finance providers, installation and maintenance tradespeople, and others will need to be involved.
It is a daunting task, but one that many PLMA members seemed ready to tackle.
One issue that flew somewhat under the radar, but is central to making this next phase possible, is standardization and interoperability. That topic was central to Derapi Founder & President Thomas Lee’s presentation, Accelerating Vendor Onboarding, which explored how the interoperability challenge plays out as load flexibility programs seek to expand.
In the presentation, we discussed a case study involving Derapi’s work supporting Uplight’s onboarding of multiple battery vendors into a utility program in Connecticut ahead of the 2025 season. Rather than requiring separate custom integrations for every vendor relationship, Derapi implemented a translation layer that enabled multiple OEMs to connect through a single integration.
That approach reduced development effort, accelerated program readiness, and preserved the participant experience, while also creating an architecture that could be reused across additional utility programs in New York and Washington, and is being used for multiple new programs in 2026.
The broader implication is significant: with the right integration infrastructure, onboarding new device vendors increasingly becomes a business decision rather than a lengthy technical integration project.
Historically, much of the industry conversation around interoperability has focused on standardizing device communications across vendors. That work remains important. But one of the key takeaways from this experience was that many core device capabilities are already relatively consistent between vendors.
Increasingly, the larger source of complexity lies in the differences between utility programs themselves. Many of these differences are non-technical in nature, but drive significant technical complexity.
Those differences often appear non-technical and include enrollment and unenrollment workflows, data reporting requirements, dispatch logic, interpretation of device capabilities and behaviors, and other program parameters. Both technical and non-technical variations force customizations in software implementations. This friction slows deployment timelines and increases costs and operational burden across the ecosystem.
In that sense, interoperability is a two-way street: if business requirements are not standardized, technical implementations and communication protocols cannot be, either.
While technical standards development is an important endeavor (and one in which multiple Derapi team members participate, until such time as utilities and the broader industry come to consensus on business and technical use cases for DER devices, the need for custom and proprietary implementations will remain.
Given the pace at which the industry is changing and the challenges of bringing all the relevant stakeholders together, this consensus will not develop anytime soon.
In the meantime, an adaptable and agile integration infrastructure will be essential. It can help bridge the gap between the systems, markets, programs, and organizations that need to work together to scale load flexibility effectively.
Because if load flexibility is going to become a dependable part of the utility operating stack, the industry will need more than promising technology. It will need the connective infrastructure that allows that technology to work across programs, partners, and markets at scale.