Why Flexibility Projects Stall Before They Start 

Chris Bernkopf, CEO of Podero, in conversation  

Lindley Gooden: Great to have you with us. Let’s talk about distributed energy resources, flexibility, and a lot more, with Chris Bernkopf from Podero. Chris, how are you? 

Chris Bernkopf: Doing good, thank you. 

Lindley Gooden: Tell us what you do. 

Chris Bernkopf: I’m the CEO of Podero. We’re a demand-side flexibility platform – we control assets on the energy market, so heat pumps, batteries, electric vehicles, inverters, and soon ACs, to trade those power sources on the markets. That generates money for consumers, which in turn helps retailers retain those customers for longer, and keeps them happier. 

Lindley Gooden: The word “flexibility” has never been more central to this conversation than it is right now. What does running a flex project actually mean to you? 

Chris Bernkopf: For a utility, running a flex project usually means developing a novel value proposition – one that attracts new customers and retains existing ones. The goal is always to save money for consumers, and sometimes to earn money for the utility itself. 

Picture a fleet of flexible assets: batteries, EV chargers, heat pumps. You control every device according to the power market. But controlling a device on its own doesn’t generate much economic value – especially since most consumers are on fixed tariffs, so they don’t benefit from you switching things on and off at different times. 

What the utility has to do is take the load curve of the entire fleet and trade that power in the flexibility markets – spot, day-ahead, intraday, or balancing. That generates revenue, which gets passed on to customers. 

Lindley Gooden: So the flexibility is really in the many different elements within your local energy supply chain. 

Chris Bernkopf: Exactly – and that’s the biggest untapped potential in an energy market. Millions of devices in distributed homes currently aren’t talking to each other, and they don’t know what the market prices are doing. We have to bring them together so they can work together and help bring about the energy transition. 

Lindley Gooden: So what’s the commercial case? Where’s the revenue, and the potential to smooth out supply? 

Chris Bernkopf: There are essentially two ways to make money from flexibility, for assets big or small: the wholesale markets and the balancing (or ancillary) markets. 

On the wholesale side, you’re shifting power from one half-hour block to the next, trying to earn arbitrage revenue – sell high, buy low. On the grid balancing markets, you’re turning devices up or down based on what the grid needs, whether that’s at a national level (the transmission grid) or a local level (the substation). Every time you do that, you get paid – and you also get paid simply for being available to do it. 

All of those revenue streams flow to the utility, and ideally, they pass on almost all of it – or 100% – to the consumer. That way, more consumers join, buy more of these devices, and we keep decarbonising the energy system. 

Lindley Gooden: Once you start, you can’t stop. I’ve got a battery – now I want more of this. It turns us into geeks, doesn’t it? 

Chris Bernkopf: It’s almost like an addiction. A lot of my family members started with a heat pump, or with solar, and now they have everything. I live in a flat, but I’ve got AC, I’m getting rooftop solar, balcony solar – it’s unstoppable once you start. 

Lindley Gooden: Solar is always the gateway drug. So where does Podero come in? There’s clearly value on all sides – for the customer, for the utility. 

Chris Bernkopf: Podero is the intelligence layer that makes it all work. You have the installed assets, the utility’s access to the power markets, and maybe the utility’s own consumer app – but none of these are connected. 

What we’ve built is a software layer that connects the assets to our platform, connects to the utility’s trading system, and connects to the utility’s user interface, so customers can onboard and manage their devices and see how much they’re saving. We read those data flows and use our algorithms to decide, for each device, what to do and what trades to make. 

Lindley Gooden: So what does that actually look like? Are you watching individual controls for each device? 

Chris Bernkopf: Precisely. From each device we get data every five seconds to a few minutes. We process all of it and sense-check it – sometimes a meter’s been installed upside down, for example, so it looks like the household is producing power and the solar panel is consuming it, which obviously makes no sense. 

Then, every minute for intraday trading and every thirty minutes for day-ahead, we calculate the best way to use power for that device – so it’s used at the cheapest times and earns arbitrage revenue. That runs for every device, every minute. We check what each utility’s fleet will do, send over the trading information, the utility executes the trades, gets paid, and passes that on. 

Lindley Gooden: I imagine you can just flick on an “auto” setting and the house handles itself. But that’s a big jump for a lot of utilities – and customers – to get comfortable with. What would you say to those who feel they’re not ready yet? 

Chris Bernkopf: Utilities have a tricky job. There’s been so much change in the last few years – first green energy tariffs, then spot tariffs, and now flexibility. The average consumer wants to feel safe, cozy, and pay as little as possible. They don’t want to become a flex expert. 

So the challenge is packaging the product simply enough to reach the mass market, without confusing or scaring people off. The key skill for a utility is crafting a value proposition that’s simple but effective, and that can reach most customers. 

Here’s an example of what doesn’t work: say 95% of your customers are on a fixed tariff, and you build a proposition just for your dynamic-tariff customers with one specific wall-box brand. Your addressable market might end up being 0.1% – nowhere near enough to move the needle. Then you conclude the project failed, when really the proposition was just too narrow. 

What we provide is the software to trade across all electricity contracts, and we work with most major device manufacturers, so we offer broad connectivity. That means, first, you can build a proposition that works for the average customer without having to segment your marketing. And second, it reduces the risk of overly complex propositions – the kind where you tell a customer “I’ll pay you based on what I earn,” and now they’re at home trying to calculate whether they made 30 cents or 40 that day. 

Instead, we guarantee utilities a fixed savings rate. We might say: “I guarantee you’ll save 120 euros a year, because I know I can generate 150.” That means the utility can tell a customer: connect a compatible device, and you’ll get 120 euros or pounds a year. The risk sits with Podero, and the utility can offer a genuinely simple product. We’ve seen plenty of cases where a utility started with something complex and custom, and converged over time on something simple that actually reaches the mass market. 

Lindley Gooden: We’ve talked a lot at this event about energy security and stabilising local energy use – and this sounds like something that could directly support that, by helping regulate local demand. What would you say to a utility that says, “That’s great, but I’ll do it next year”? 

Chris Bernkopf: In sales, the biggest competitor is always doing it next year. But we’ve seen this work very successfully for some companies already – Octopus, chiefly, though others too. You can see the retention it drives, and the noise those companies can make in their marketing. 

More and more, doing nothing becomes unattractive, because the pain of falling behind is so high. Honestly, our best sales employee is Octopus. 

What a utility needs is something that’s easy to propagate through the organisation – usually there’s one person who’s genuinely excited about this, but they can’t make it happen alone. So it’s about making it simple to start, taking the risk out, and showing it’s already a safe choice. It’s a safe choice partly because Octopus, a market leader, is already doing it. And we make it low-risk by guaranteeing the savings – if you don’t believe us, we’ll guarantee it contractually. 

The last piece is making it simple to start. We have a full suite of software just for a proof of concept or soft launch – our own apps, our own dashboards, our own connections into the trading system – so the utility doesn’t have to lift a technical finger. Eventually, of course, the utility should bring as much in-house as possible. They’re not going to build another Podero, but they should own their own user interface and the full customer relationship. We don’t block that path – we just want the starting point to be as easy as possible. 

Lindley Gooden: Brilliant. Chris, thanks so much for joining us and explaining it all. That’s it for this episode of Future of Utilities: Insights. See you next time.