My latest Energy Insights interview is with Sean Layerle of Baalbek Insights - and centres on flexibility in the energy sector - very much on the central pillars of the Future of Utilities Summit.
Sean’s core argument is that the technology side of flexibility has largely stabilised, but adoption hasn’t caught up. He frames this as the “elephant in the room”: both B2B and B2C customers are being asked to engage with propositions that are still too complex and too abstract for them to act on.
I asked who was winning between legacy energy companies and flexibility startups, his answer is that neither group has an edge, because both are approaching the problem from an equipment and engineering lens rather than a customer one. He describes his company’s role as helping clients solve problems closer to the customer than to the tech itself.
The most interesting element, though, is his point about hindsight. He dates the real inflexion point for flexibility to around 2022 to 2023, meaning the industry only has four or five years of meaningful cross-sector experience to draw on. That’s short enough that companies moving from grid scale into residential, or vice versa, have almost no benchmark to work from. That’s why the companies pulling ahead right now are the ones willing to test, learn, and take calculated risks rather than wait for a proven playbook.