Moving beyond the grid bottleneck with smart technology

**Eklavya Gupte** (0:01)
Welcome to Energy Evolution, a podcast where we examine the forces shaping how we power, fuel and electrify our future.
I'm your host, Eklavya Gupte, and in this episode, we're exploring a fundamental question. Can we actually build our way out of the grid crisis? Or is the answer not more infrastructure, but smarter use of what we already have? Now, the energy transition is colliding with an infrastructure reality.
Renewable capacity is surging, electric vehicles are flooding the roads, especially in some economies like China, and data centers are multiplying at breakneck speed, especially in the US.
But the grid, which has been designed for a different era, is struggling to keep pace.
Yet there's another path emerging, one that is built on flexibility, intelligence and consumer participation. It's about turning electric vehicles, heat pumps and home batteries into virtual power plants. It's about shifting demand to match supply, rather than endlessly expanding supply to meet demand. And it's about reimagining the grid, not as a one-way highway, but as a dynamic, responsive network where millions of devices communicate, optimize and balance the system in real time. Now, to some extent, this is already happening. Utilities are managing gigawatts of distributed energy. Consumers are signing up for tariffs that reward flexibility. And this technology underpinning it all, that is smart devices, AI-driven optimization, real-time data flows, is advancing faster than the physical grid ever could. But of course, challenges remain. Device integration is very, very fragmented. Consumer adoption is also uneven. And the regulatory frameworks governing energy markets is also evolving constantly. Now, to find out more on this, I spoke with Devrim Celal, Chief Flexibility and Marketing Officer at Kraken Technologies. Kraken operates in almost 8 gigawatts of virtual power capacity across half a million devices, from utility scale batteries to consumer EVs and heat pumps. Now, to start off, I asked Devrim whether we truly need to spend trillions upgrading the grid, or whether smart technology and demand flexibility might offer a more practical path forward. His answer frames both the scale of the challenge and also the emerging alternatives that could reshape how we think about infrastructure investment.

**Devrim Celal** (2:53)
We do need great upgrades. There's this famous chart by Edison Energy Institute in the US that shows investments into renewables and investments into distribution networks. And those two charts go hand in hand for a long time. But sometime in the last 10 years, the renewable side is showing a little bit of a hockey stick, whereas the network side is growing but not at the same rate. And that suddenly shows, if you think of those as the supply and demand curves, distribution being the supply and renewables demanding something, it shows you something hasn't gone right in that domain. The second part of that is that we've built these networks with one engineering solution in mind, which was it needs to handle the worst case scenario that you and I can conceive. Which these days is happening very often with the World Cup, because at half time, energy geeks have been loving posting electricity consumption data online that shows a little bit of a peak. And that comes from a lot of us doing something at the same time, which in this case is most likely flicking on the kettle to brew a cup of tea before the second half starts.
That's how we built them. So suddenly, two things are changing. We're putting more renewables onto them, and then consumers are buying electric vehicles, heat pumps and batteries.
And that change in profile is significant, because when someone buys an electric vehicle, electricity becomes their second largest household item after their rent or mortgage. But it also means that they use a lot more, and they happen to use a lot more when the grid is already congested at 6 p.m. in the afternoon. So under that scenario, we need to build incredible amount of grids, so much so even if we have enough money and we can find transformers which are backlogged at the moment and dig up copper to build them with, it would end up being the most expensive infrastructure project ever in human history.
So the solution should be using flexibility. So no longer saying I'm going to engineer the system to the worst possible outcome, I'm actually optimize the system to delay some of the investments that I will need to do. And that's where consumer flexibility comes. Our ability to shift consumption and generation by storing it to times and locations when we have more renewables and more grid capacity.

**Eklavya Gupte** (5:36)
Now, we know the stress on the grid is rising. And with it, the shape of electricity demand is also evolving in ways we haven't seen before.