Claudia Richter from OhmConnect explains what Demand Response is and why this program can actually pay people for saving energy in their homes. We’ve explained before how Demand Response can be a win-win for California. Pretty much, when everyone is pigging out on electricity, people who are willing to use less can get paid by the utility company. Claudia goes into detail how people get started on Demand Response right away. Everything is free, and as their company message reads “Save Energy. Get Paid.”

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TRAVIS:  Today, we have Claudia Richter from OhmConnect, which does something called Demand Response. We’re going to get into that a little bit. Claudia heads up product and customer experience for OhmConnect. Hi Claudia. How are you doing?

CLAUDIA:  I’m doing great. Thanks for having me.

TRAVIS:  Of course, we love to have you here. All right. We have a lot to talk about. But before we get to allthat, we’d like to start with our typical icebreaker. Claudia, what’s the first thing you remember wanting to be growing up?

CLAUDIA:  Oh, well that’s embarrassing. A princess. A lot of girls want to be a princess. Then by the time I reached high school, I wanted to be the CEO of IBM. I was good at math, and I heard that IBM does a lot of math stuff. Those were the two early ambitions.

TRAVIS:  What do you do now, and how’d you get into it?

CLAUDIA:  I’m at OhmConnect and head up product management and customer experience there. What that means is this: when you offer digital products, let’s say the digital product is Uber, the Head of Product comes up with a product strategy in terms of what features we should be building to either grow our customer base or deepen our customer relationships or increase revenues. That’s the product side of things.

CLAUDIA:  Then on the customer experience side, my team also does direct customer support and manages our forum, reviews and feedback. That’s a nice closed loop in terms of hearing the voice of our customers in forming our product roadmap. I’ve been at OhmConnect for the past two years. Prior to that, I worked in banking and fintech.

TRAVIS:  That’s interesting. What drove you to the energy industry from banking and fintech?

CLAUDIA:  It was November 2016. I decided I should do something different. I had been in banking for a long time. I wanted to do something different after the 2016 election. The clean energy space was something I’d been interested in for a while. I do have a lot of friends that work in this space in the Bay Area. So, I figured let’s try something different and work for a mission driven company.

TRAVIS:  We need more people like you. That’s great. Two years ago you got into OhmConnect. Can you explain a little bit about what you guys do?

CLAUDIA:  Yeah, absolutely. As your listeners may or may not know, when you think about energy and the grid, the grid needs to be balanced. The grid operators in California–that’s CAISO–are making sure that the supply is balanced out or there’s enough supply to meet the demand on the grid. As we’re transitioning to clean energy and as we’re getting more solar during the day and more wind at night, we will produce less unclean energy. But, for now, we still have this problem where there are times where the demand really peaks relative to clean energy. In California—as you may know—there are flex alert days. We have them on the east coast as well. In California, that often happens on really hot days where a ton of people are using AC (air conditioning). It particularly happens around the time when people are leaving work and coming home and making dinner. All the while, offices are still running their AC. This is a big stressor as far as trying to balance the electric grid.

CLAUDIA:  Demand response traditionally is about reducing demand on peak days. So, for certain days in the summer, can we rely on people to make significant reductions? Traditionally, utilities have relied on commercial and industrial big clients. On the consumer side, the utilities have not been very successful in the past in getting households to make reductions during peak demand. Utility companies are challenged with building relationships with customers. A lot of customers interact with their utility by paying their bill online. Maybe it’s even automatically deducted from their bank accounts. They’re not even going online to check their bill.

TRAVIS:  As a user of OhmConnect, how does a person participate in this reduction and get rewarded?

CLAUDIA:  Basically, we are primarily in California although we are expanding. What happens is this. When you sign up with OhmConnect, you’ll be able to see how much energy your home is using. We keep track of that. Separately, we keep track of how much demand there is on the grid. When there’s an opportunity to get paid for reduction from the grid, OhmConnect will let our users know we’re going to have an “OhmHour.” Generally, you are notified of these opportunities a day ahead. We will dispatch an OhmHour to our users saying something like “tomorrow from 6 to 7 pm, please reduce.”

CLAUDIA:  We get paid for the difference between the average use from the prior 10 days compared to what the user can save during an OhmHour. Basically, we get credit for any reduction beyond the average use of our population that we dispatch. For example, in the summer, if you had AC running and then shut it off for an hour, that’s going to be a pretty significant reduction versus what you would have otherwise been doing. The energy reduction ends up being from a combination of automated reductions and family events. In a family event, the whole family gets involved, e.g. running around the house turning off the lights or turning it into a family game night. That’s the core of our offering right now.

TRAVIS:  I see. As a user, I first sign up for Demand Response through OhmConnect. Then, I get a message the day before for OhmHour, when I get to significantly reduce electric use and get paid for it. And then I can install something automatic like a thermostat or I can do something with my family, e.g. go to the mall or something.

CLAUDIA:  Yep.

TRAVIS:  Then I get paid for the reductions during that OhmHour? Is that how this works?

CLAUDIA:  Yep.

TRAVIS:  I know you guys share on your website a lot of customer stories about how people are using their OhmHours. Do you mind sharing some of the things that people are doing as family events?

CLAUDIA:  Yeah. There are a lot of families who will use it for family game night. It’s basically a way to disconnect from what’s going on. Kids might have otherwise been watching TV or playing games on the game console. Oftentimes, it’s about going back to the basics, e.g. just playing board games as a family or just reading together. Some people like reading with a flashlight. It’s not necessarily that the lights are the biggest energy use, but it’s this notion that we’re going to do this together and unplug and do these things. Other examples include people just using an OhmHour as an impromptu date night to get out of the house. We are very much encouraging community events within that timeframe.

TRAVIS:  You’re actually getting family time or date time at the same time you’re getting paid for it, right?

CLAUDIA:  Yeah.

TRAVIS:  If someone is pretty diligent about saving during OhmHours, how much can they expect to be getting paid? Or how does that all work?

CLAUDIA:  Yeah, that’s a great question. It does depend on what your base energy uses. It’s a good solution for homes that are fairly energy intensive. Some of the areas that benefit from Demand Response most are in areas such as Fresno and Bakersfield where it gets really hot. So, we have been shifting our model to increase what the rewards are in the summer, really pushing for deep reductions.

CLAUDIA:  One of the programs we’ve had that was very successful last year and that we’re planning to run again this summer is called “MegaSummer.” Basically, what we do with MegaOhmHours is that we shift the program from just beating your forecast to deep reductions. Because if you just beat your forecast, you’re not quite helping the grid yet.

CLAUDIA:  We prefer collective effort to yield deep reductions. The Mega Summer program gives you these bigger rewards. We have seen people being rewarded hundreds of dollars for the summer based on reductions, depending on the type of home. The rewards that a user can accrue via OhmConnect come from a number of different factors. One, in the summer we provide the MegaOhmHour as we have just mentioned. This is for very deep reduction. Second, we pay people based on streaks. A streak is the number of consecutive OhmHours that you have successfully reduced energy use. Someone on a streak of twenty will get a 100% increase on their base points. Third, there are tiers. It’s basically the more you reduce on average, the higher your tier level is. We provide you an amplifier based on both your historic depth of reduction and consistency of reduction.

Continue on to part 2 of this interview where Claudia Richter talks about what the future of the smart grid and what electricity in your home will be like a decade from now.