So if people are very concerned about where and how can we better explain things to customers,
that's a big flag that they're asking the wrong questions.
Because if that's the question you're preoccupied by,
that means that you really haven't understood what is actually salient,
what's actually important to customers.
The energy transition is happening,
but is it fair?
Is it working for people like you and me,
or just for big market players?
Welcome to Energetic.
I am Mayim Cornelis,
an expert in energy and climate policies,
and I bring you the voices shaping our energy future.
Activists,
scientists,
policymakers,
the real people making real change,
often against the odds.
Here,
we do not settle for surface-level takes.
We dig into the challenges,
the solutions,
and the lessons.
that do not always make the headlines.
And in doing so,
we rediscover something vital,
our ability to trust in institutions,
to believe in change,
and to reclaim our power to act.
Because if we want just resilience,
if we want just transition,
we need to understand what it takes to make it happen.
And more importantly,
we need to believe that we can.
Let's get into it.
So today on Energy Hitch,
we explore a question that keeps resurfacing in all the conversations I hear across the energy industry,
no matter the trend or the technology.
Why is it so hard to build solutions people actually want to use?
My guest,
Sean Lilliel,
has spent his entire career trying to answer that question.
14 years in the Silicon Valley,
work across five continents,
roles at Opower,
EnergyNog,
and now as managing partner at Dalbeck Insight,
where he supports some of the world's largest energy and tech companies on their most complex digital challenges.
Sean works at the intersection of product management,
behavioral science,
and data-intensive digital solutions.
He helps teams break out their assumption,
rethink how users make decisions,
and design products that match real human motivations rather than imagined ones.
In this conversation,
we look at what the energy sector still misunderstands about people,
why customer adoption remains a broken promise,
and how good product culture can become a lever for a fairer and faster energy transition.
So we will start with Sharon's own journey,
shaped by early work in demand-side management and behavioral nudges,
and then broaden out to the structural challenges facing energy companies.
As electrification,
flexibility and distributed resources deployment accelerates.
Sean,
welcome to the show.
Thanks a lot for having me.
Thanks for the invitation.
So you spent
14 years in the Silicon Valley before moving into the European energy transition.
When you look back,
what kind of mindset from that period still guides the way you think about product culture today?
Yeah,
I think so.
I have lots of very fond memories from that time.
I met my spouse in California,
still have lots of friends and some family in California.
But I think there are really two things that have stayed with me that are very,
very different from a lot of other markets.
One is velocity.
And the other one is customer centricity.
The speed at which things move in California in particular,
but in the U.S.
as a whole,
is really quite different from anywhere else.
I think there's a few reasons for that.
There's some cultural reasons,
which,
you know,
there's a lot of debate as to,
you know,
whether the pendulum swings a little bit too far towards velocity in the U.S.
where people...
The work-life balance in the U.S.
is not the same as the work-life balance that we enjoy in Europe.
So it's not to say that it's a magical,
perfect paradigm.
But certainly for tech companies,
for energy companies as well,
things do move very,
very quickly.
I go back to the San Francisco area every year for about five or six weeks.
and
And I'm reminded of this,
you know,
and it can be very silly little things like the fact that everyone will respond to you in less than 48 hours.
So if you email.
you know,
almost anybody about anything,
you're going to get an answer back,
you know,
either within a day,
day and a half.
And so even just those little human interactions,
you know,
things are iterating faster,
things are progressing faster,
decisions are being made,
you know,
all the way to,
you know,
bigger topics like just risk,
appetite for risk and risk tolerance.
I think there's a uh
a higher tolerance for failing and potentially failing,
you know,
in a pretty visible,
pretty dramatic manner.
And I'm talking about,
so it could be at the scale of a team.
So failing very visibly in front of your team or failing very visibly in front of the market,
both of those are okay and so
I think
That's something that I try to bring to certainly our team,
to our projects,
to our clients,
to help them move a little bit faster and be a little bit more comfortable taking risks.
And again,
it could be just as much at the personal level in front of your team.
Don't be afraid to make mistakes,
to fail,
to make bad decisions.
Yeah,
to try.
Yeah,
exactly.
At the end of the day,
that's what it comes down to is being comfortable to try something because nobody has a crystal ball.
Obviously,
you make educated decisions,
you calculate risk,
but no one has a crystal ball.
So you have to try something and you have to be ready that maybe it's not going to work exactly the way you planned.
Yeah,
it's very much a scientific method,
right?
You try and you see if the conclusion arrives to what you were expecting or if not.
It's really interesting what you were sharing,
because indeed,
this kind of this capacity to try.
And at the end of the day,
it also shows this kind of vulnerability.
Like we try,
we fail.
It's part of life.
We are human.
And at the same time,
well,
the Silicon Valley is known to be one of the,
let's say,
tech-centric,
most tech-centric place.
It's like it feels almost inhuman,
not inhumane.
but inhuman given the pace of it,
like from an external eye.
So it's really interesting what you are saying,
that at the end of the day,
it's probably one of the most profoundly human place to be because people dare to be human and dare to fail and dare to try again.
And yeah,
they made a mistake and it didn't work.
They didn't take the right decision,
but that's okay.
Tomorrow will be another day.
Right.
It's whereas it's true that,
yeah,
in Europe,
sometimes it feels that,
OK,
you take a bad turn,
a bad decision,
and then it haunts you for the rest of your life or something.
Yeah.
I think there's a,
you know,
I'm not an anthropologist,
but it would be fascinating to have an anthropologist perspective on,
you know,
how the how the cultures have shaped these these mentalities.
And again,
we're talking in generalities.
Of course,
there are people in Europe that...
that take tons of risk.
And there are amazing entrepreneurs in Europe who move very quickly.
And conversely,
there are a lot of people in the US who are very risk averse,
especially in the energy sector.
But speaking in generalities,
I think in the US,
I remember when,
because obviously I've made lots of mistakes along the way,
I've made bad decisions and have experienced projects that didn't go the way we hoped.
And there's a real focus on lessons learned.
So,
you know,
people really invite discussion and feedback around,
you know,
okay,
this thing happened.
Let's break down why it happened.
And let's build on that.
Let's understand.
Let's learn.
As opposed to,
you know,
I feel like in some of the work environments in Europe,
there's a little bit more hesitation because...
Perhaps there's going to be some judgment about,
well,
you know,
why did you,
you know,
why did you make that decision?
You know,
what mistakes in judgment did you make that led you to have this problem or this difficulty?
And it's not,
you know,
it comes,
it seems like it comes more at a kind of a nitpicking perspective as opposed to,
you know,
okay,
this was an experience.
Let's figure out what we can learn from that experience.
And that's very interesting because that circles back to customer service.
Like trying to,
what do we learn from this bad experience the consumer had instead of trying to find the culprit and,
you know,
blame all the chain of command for a mistake.
And then leading to immobility,
of course,
and leading to,
yeah,
perhaps a fear of negative feedback.
Yeah.
Yeah,
I think the second thing that
I think the U.S.
and,
you know,
I don't want to be too focused on the U.S.
because I do see that there are certain markets like the U.K.
or in some
Scandinavian countries where,
you know,
this is done very well.
But there's a big focus.
I think the U.K.
actually does this really well.
There's a big culture around.
Customer centricity,
focusing on the customer,
what customer wants,
you know,
speaking to them in their language.
And I think the way that companies acquire this reflex over time is by digging into those lessons learned.
This is by focusing on the problems,
focusing on stuff that hasn't worked,
understanding,
having a deep understanding of why it didn't work.
and then getting those insights,
the customer insights to understand,
okay,
well,
this is what people...
misinterpreted or this is the assumptions we made about the value people were looking for and those were you know the wrong assumptions um and so we have to shift the value proposition etc yeah that's uh extremely interesting and that uh also uh like
circles back with uh the work i've been doing with ombudsmen so the bodies who are in charge of uh
Handling the disputes between energy consumers and the suppliers or the energy businesses.
And the culture of,
let's say,
redress in the UK is way stronger than it is in other countries.
Where I live in Italy,
you have quite a strong culture of litigation.
You have a strong culture of complaining,
but it's not as structured.
and the way you will use the lessons from...
The mistake is way less structured than the one you find in the UK.
And those are only two examples because I've worked also with ombudsmen in Belgium,
in France and in many different EU countries,
actually.
So that's very interesting and very,
very true what you said.
But yeah,
I would like to circle back to your earlier work.
You worked with Opower and
Enernoc. So this job puts you right inside the first generation of...
Behavioral Digital Tools for Energy.
Yeah.
So what did those years teach you about how people respond to energy information?
What has stayed surprisingly constant?
Yeah,
so those experiences were really foundational for me.
So in chronological order,
I was at Enernoc over 15 years ago,
I think now.
And they were,
as far as I know,
they were the first company to have a software as a service solution to find energy efficiency improvements in commercial buildings using the building management software.
So there's a thing called a BMS that manages all the lights,
the heating,
cooling,
all kinds of different equipment,
you know,
typically in larger buildings.
increasingly that's done more and more by a piece of software.
And Internoctr is one of the first companies to figure out that you can build software to run on top of that data,
run algorithms on the thousands of data points that you get from all the equipment in the building,
and that the algorithms could find energy efficiency opportunities.
So it worked quite well,
that product.
still exists in the market today.
It's under a company called Measurable.
Silicon Valley goes,
there's lots of mergers and acquisitions,
but that product is still out there.
And what really was a game changer for me was when we started to deploy the first few projects and we were finding energy efficiency opportunities,
but we kept getting these mystery consumption and
waste or these mystery consumption excesses that we couldn't explain in the data.
And as we talked to the building engineers,
the building operators,
the staff,
we started to find all these anecdotes of
you know,
a chess club.
This was with a school.
There's a chess club that came on Wednesday evenings.
And,
you know,
the building schedule would shut down the heating after school was over.
And so this chess club would play chess,
you know,
cold.
And so they made friends with one of the janitors who had figured out that,
you know,
if he
There was a manual override that he could hit with a broomstick and it would bring the heat back on.
And then there's another anecdote about an executive who was staying late and so the lights were put on for that person.
But then that override was never brought back to the usual schedule.
And so now you had a building with the lights on 24-7,
etc.,
etc.
And as we were finding these things,
I started to realize.
This was the first game changer for me is that we can't engineer ourselves out of the problem.
We will have to take into account the human dynamics in the problem,
all the human factors,
the human element,
all these little illogical factors that that has to be taken into account somehow.
Wow.
So that was the first moment of clarity where I realized that
software by itself or equipment by itself was not going to do the trick.
Coincidentally,
around that time,
around the early
2010s, I think,
is when Opower was founded.
They made a lot of noise very quickly in California.
So I knew about them even back when I was at Interac.
And they were really the first company to do behavioral science applied at mass market scale.
And weren't the ones who were saying people think about their energy the way they think about their toilet paper,
about nine minutes per year or something?
Yeah,
so originally,
so that number originally,
to give credit where credit is due,
that number originally came from an Accenture survey.
So Accenture,
I don't know if they still do it today,
but Accenture used to do this annual energy consumer survey and report.
And so they had...
identified this one data point and Opower,
you know,
kind of took it and ran with it.
But yes,
the broader point they had was that,
you know,
energy is not top of mind for people outside of the energy sector.
That's just the reality.
Even post,
you know,
2022 energy crisis,
you know,
yes,
it's a priority for households,
but it's not the number one thing that people think about all the time.
So Opower was able to figure out that there's a whole body of academic research that understands how people make decisions and what drives human behavior.
And so they had a crazy idea to say,
well,
if we have all of these well-codified principles,
why don't we use that and use that to design the software,
use that to design the...
the interventions and to motivate people's behavior specifically on energy and you know leverage software to be able to do that across millions and millions of customers and so that that was the the product itself was a pretty pretty huge success they ended up being acquired by oracle in 2016 i believe and so now the the
product again you know still exists but it exists under an oracle banner now no that's that's really really interesting because that's
Later,
something that you brought back to Europe,
right?
Back to France.
Yeah,
just for the listeners,
you are French and American.
You have your own citizenship.
So that's why you also have a very French surname,
but a wonderful
American accent as well.
Yeah,
I'm undercover.
I'm pretty undercover as a French guy.
My wife,
she feels like she...
She really got the short end of the stick because she got a French guy who sounds like a Californian.
Yeah,
yeah.
Okay,
so you've been back to Europe and you founded a first business and now you have merged as Balbeck Insight.
And in your work,
you have noticed that the energy sector remains kind of stuck in a tech first reflex.
So does he agree with you?
That's really,
really kind of maddening to see how little,
let's say,
people experience is taken into consideration when building something and putting it out there.
And yeah,
that's why I really wanted you on the show,
because I really want to pick your brain on it.
So let's start first with the science.
How do you identify when a team is designing around its own ascension?
rather than its users.
Yeah,
so it's,
you know,
there are a few things.
I think one thing I would say before answering your question directly is,
you know,
I have a lot of empathy for the energy sector as a whole,
because historically,
long planning cycles,
risk management,
safety,
all of those things,
especially when energy companies were still vertically integrated,
which is still largely.
the case in the U.S.,
not the case in Europe.
But it was fundamental to take time,
be safe,
control risk,
et cetera.
And so in the early
2000s, I think it was still,
I had lots and lots of empathy for this tech-first reflex and the kind of infrastructure or hardware-first reflex.
as we get...
further along into the
2000s, I feel like,
you know,
it's time to start to accelerate that change.
And so to answer your question,
you know,
there are a few things that we could see right away,
which are a bit of a flag for us when we come into a project.
The first thing is,
when we see that the team is really concerned about how can we find ways or find
places in the product,
in the customer journey,
in the emails,
whatever it is,
to explain things better to customers.
So if people are very concerned about where and how can we better explain things to customers,
that's a big flag that they're asking the wrong questions.
Because if that's the question you're...
preoccupied by,
that means that you really haven't understood what is actually salient,
what's actually important to customers.
And you're focused on getting them to understand what is important to you as an energy company,
as a software company.
So that's really one of the first flags that we see pretty consistently when companies will ask us,
well,
we want...
to launch a flexibility or demand response service or a feature inside an app or a new customer journey to encourage people to participate in demand response events.
And so we're trying to figure out,
can you help us with behavioral science to explain demand response?
Yeah,
yeah,
yeah.
It's the wrong question.
Fundamentally,
that's the wrong question.
There isn't.
some behavioral science magic that we can sprinkle that all of a sudden will make demand response.
The usual answer that is taken is being taken by the marketing team.
We will be saying,
we will do a communication campaign,
but very often this communication campaign is not targeted.
It's not like not starting an assumption and not going anywhere.
So what would be the right question to ask then.
Yeah,
so I think there's one...
behavioral principle that's very very useful to be aware of this was something that was i think cataloged for the first time back in the
70s
1970s so it's you know it's we're not talking about something that was you know discovered last year um but it's so this was i think out of stanford in the 70s and it's it's called a false consensus bias and the idea basically is that
What we think is normal,
we assume everybody also thinks that that's normal.
So what we think is intuitive or even just what
I think is intuitive,
what I think is pretty,
what I think is easy,
I'm going to make assumptions and design customer journeys,
design products,
offerings,
whatever it is,
based on those assumptions of what I think is logical.
and intuitive,
et cetera.
But the thing is,
for Marine,
that's very different,
most likely.
For a customer in Denmark,
that's very different,
et cetera,
et cetera.
So one of the first things that we always try to work with our clients on is to brief them on their own limitations.
Yeah,
their own biases of how the these mental shortcuts that are going to
work against them and try to help them break away.
And that usually is a pretty significant quick win because it helps them think about it.
It helps them see how they're being very company centric,
even if they have like,
you know,
a communication that
makes good use of humor,
communication that's very clear,
that's very concise.
Maybe on paper,
everything,
the marketing campaign,
whatever it is,
it's using all the best practices,
it looks very good,
but the engagement results are disappointing.
And usually a lot of times that's because they're using all the right practices,
but they're talking about the wrong thing.
Yeah.
So where we try to help reorient is to...
to try to figure out what is really salient.
And that's another behavioral notion of what do people perceive as being important for them.
So understanding what's going to be salient to them,
which usually has nothing to do with the energy company or the tech company.
And then focusing on that for the UX,
for the customer journey,
the offering,
whatever it is.
Yeah,
so it's really this kind of subtle choices that you call salient points.
They can be linked to wording,
timing,
framing.
They are probably way more.
But can you share an example where,
you know,
a small design decision or when you helped a client and that transformed adoption or engagement?
Yeah,
sure.
So there are a couple of...
examples I can think of,
one of the things that's really interesting is that it is really a case by case thing.
So there isn't like a magical playbook where,
you know,
if you use this behavioral principle or that behavioral principle,
all of a sudden,
you know,
you're going to double your engagement or whatever.
It really is a matter of understanding what's going to be salient for customers in the specific context of that journey of that.
product whatever it is there's a startup that we've been doing a lot of help um so we've been giving a lot of help to in france called niberté watts they're a demand response direct to consumer demand response uh app yeah they don't work through it through energy retailers and
when we first started working with them you know just like every well-intentioned uh player in the energy sector and
One of the first questions they asked us is,
you know,
we need to,
there's a certain way that we have to monetize demand response with the TSO,
with the transmission system operator.
So in order to trade that demand response in the market,
it needs to behave a certain way.
So how do we explain that?
Can you help us explain that to customers?
And of course,
you know.
My answer is that you can't.
There's no way that you will ever have the time,
the attention span to be able to explain any of that to your users.
And they had been pulling their hair out,
you know,
trying to,
they had all these different versions and all these different approaches.
And again,
they were like,
the design was very good.
The language was funny.
like I'm
They were doing everything right in terms of the cosmetic aspects,
but they were focused on the wrong thing.
So what we did was,
so Liberté Watt,
and again,
it has to be specific to the product.
So Liberté Watt,
they reward customers for participating in demand response events with points.
And those points,
they have a bunch of partnerships with retailers,
like electronics or gyms or whatever.
Sure.
And those points will convert to gift cards for,
yeah,
to buy AirPods or,
you know,
whatever.
So what they've done is they've really made it all about gamification to be able to win as many points as possible,
to be able to convert,
you know,
these points.
So what we said was,
look,
what is salient to someone who's coming and using your app is not the market mechanisms.
to monetize demand response.
It's not what's salient to them.
What's salient to them is how do I win as many points as possible so that
I can get a bunch of stuff,
right?
So we completely changed the way they were thinking about the customer journey and made it focused on getting customers to play as quickly as possible.
So when you think about a video game,
there's no like
big explanation about all the universe around the video game and who all the characters are and all the different levels they just get you to play they get you to start playing and you learn as you start playing so
that's really what we focused on is how can we
pull people into the UX as quickly as possible and get them to start earning points and get them to start,
you know,
participating in events,
getting feedback and get them engaged.
So
I think now they're just a couple of years old,
but I think they passed like
30,000 users or something like that.
So they've had a really,
really rapid growth as far as,
you know.
As far as demand response in France could,
you know,
could hope to grow.
They've done really well,
especially given that,
you know,
they're not tied to any particular energy retailer.
Yeah,
no,
that's very interesting also because you can make comparisons with other sectors.
Like,
I don't know,
I use Duolingo for languages and I don't usually play video games,
but I'm very addicted to Duolingo.
and how...
You know,
I have this mini rewards,
like points for absolutely nothing and just play with friends and so on.
And yeah,
indeed,
it's like very easy,
very annoying for the people in the room who are not playing with me on Duolingo.
But that makes it,
yeah,
that makes it fun and entertaining.
And at the end of the day,
yeah,
the method itself is efficient,
but it's also like the universe that they put together that is efficient,
right?
So it's really working on...
on both,
let's say,
both streams.
But
I guess that it's also to them,
like to make a nice step back to understand that what they wanted at the end of the day was for people to come back to the app and not only like use it once,
but come back to it and see where the saving points were.
And yeah,
I find it quite,
yeah,
indeed in Liberty Watts,
I don't live in France,
so I haven't used it.
But.
I've seen a little bit of the platform and it looks really cool compared to many other things I have seen elsewhere.
I'm like,
that's bad,
guys.
Yeah,
yeah.
And
I like that example because it's demand response.
I mean,
even the name demand response,
those two words together,
I always thought,
you know,
it's a terrible name.
It is.
because yes,
technically...
It's the response of,
you know,
electric demand to the needs of the grid.
But it's just,
it's a terrible name.
And,
you know,
it's not going to be natural or intuitive to anyone.
And we can see a lot of retailers,
especially since,
so in Europe,
specific to Europe since 2022,
there definitely has been an inflection point on all things to do with flexibility and demand response in particular.
And we do see a lot of companies struggling to figure out,
you know,
again,
like,
how do we explain demand response?
But I fundamentally believe that's the wrong question.
It's the wrong thing to focus on.
Yeah,
I know.
I remember delivering a training in South Africa a few years ago,
and I was explaining demand response by just putting on the screen a yoga figure where you really need to have your balance.
Like,
you have the electricity on the one hand,
you have the house.
in the one hand and you need to make them match and that's like a position of yoga if you stand on one foot you need to have a balance at the center and all the students were like we had heard about it but we never knew what it was and it's like yeah but it's
not explaining to five years old but but almost yeah sometimes yeah but even you know the the difficulty in the digital world is that
Even this small interaction that you had with those individuals,
finding the space to be able to do that in a digital product or in a digital customer experience is really hard.
Because people are not going to sit through a long tutorial.
And when I say long tutorial,
again,
in the digital world,
a long tutorial can be like two or three screens.
That could already start to feel like...
Like it's a lot.
So that's really why efficiency of,
you know,
really understanding what's salient to people and just going as quickly as possible to and efficiently as possible to what's salient for people is that that's the key.
Because,
you know,
especially when we're talking about energy and internet response,
people are not naturally curious about this kind of stuff.
No,
but
I've seen recently also
Engie in France launching a campaign or a new tariff called
Happy Hours.
So basically,
you have two hours where you have very cheap electricity price because you don't pay for the electricity just for the tax and everything.
But it's like framing it as happy hours.
You don't pay.
Electricity for a couple of hours,
I mean,
that's so straightforward.
Like everybody kind of knows what a happy hour is.
In French,
of course,
because you need to translate what it is.
But that makes it very,
really,
really easy to understand because it's relatable to other concepts,
other frameworks again.
And yeah,
I find it interesting that finally...
The energy sector is starting to look at what is being done in other sectors to kind of attract and make sure that customers or people are really part of it and not only not an afterthought.
And now we are not even talking about the different,
let's say,
categories of the population who cannot engage for a variety of reasons,
who are not digitally confident either.
So that's that would be another topic of conversation.
But yeah,
I think that's...
really cool that people like you are able to you to bring this clarity when building this kind of tools yeah well i think one of the things that's that i'm it's fascinating to me now is you know as we accelerate into the the
era of flexibility you know things like this so that you know this happy hour offer and everything around.
different vehicle-to-grid offers,
smart charging offers,
all these things.
The acceleration of flexibility is opening up a whole new array of potential offers.
And I think that's super exciting because we,
so at Budbeck,
we have a practice area around digital solutions that we've talked a lot about.
We also have a practice area in data science.
So about two-thirds of the team have PhDs.
Things like physics,
mathematics,
battery,
chemistry,
even.
And so we do some pretty intense data science work.
And what we're seeing is on the topic of optimization of flexibility,
there's a really fascinating convergence of those two topics.
Because on the data science side,
obviously,
there's a lot of work to do to optimize.
if we're talking about residential,
between...
Either just aggregated demand response or for those customers,
which,
you know,
it's not everybody,
but those customers who have PV,
you know,
vehicles,
storage,
the optimization of that has a lot of technical complexity.
We've worked at the grid scale as well.
And so there's a ton of complexity there.
But ultimately,
there are customer experiences that have to be attached to that.
And so the
NG example you gave is a great example.
So this is where,
you know,
they're doing that pretty well.
But I think a lot of players are still very focused on,
you know,
look at all these ways that we can control your electric vehicle.
And it's like,
well,
that's really cool for us that are inside the energy sector.
But that's not necessarily what's going to be salient to people.
You know,
people is,
you know,
are you going to charge my car for free?
You know,
that's something I'm much more interested in and I'm much more willing to hear about your value proposition if you're telling me that if you give me access to your car,
you can have free charging,
you know,
X number of days per year or whatever the case might be.
Not even mentioning how daunting the word control can be.
I mean,
I worked on different cases where basically there was a proposal to install some devices to monitor.
to control
So that was presented as control,
the consumption of the home.
Of course,
no one wanted that,
but they were okay to get some monitoring,
but control was absolutely off-limits.
So it's also this kind of mindset that needs changing.
And yeah,
I think it's really interesting that,
you know,
you're able to blend all this data analysis,
and it's not only about collecting more data,
but collecting better data.
with really implementation.
And so what are the next steps with the Baalbek Insights now?
Well,
so,
you know,
we basically...
We have been we've been lucky.
I wish we could say that we had the vision to go after this.
But but actually,
our clients brought us on to topics of flexibility about five,
six years ago,
you know,
because they were more more forward thinking than us.
But the result now is that,
you know,
we have five,
six years of experience.
doing a lot of things that companies are trying to figure out now.
So,
you know,
optimizing flexibility in commercial buildings that have more vehicle charging,
more PV,
more storage,
doing that for cities,
and then obviously doing it on the residential front as well.
Whether it's the customer experience or the algorithms behind all that optimization,
you know,
we already have five,
six years of things that have been in market.
that are working,
that we've built for clients because fundamentally we're a consulting company,
so we don't own the IP.
Our clients own the IP.
So that's really the current acceleration of flexibility is what we're super excited about because,
again,
there's that convergence of the technical complexity,
but having to take that away from customers as much as possible.
We can't put all this technical complexity on them.
We're not going to be able to explain all this to them.
So we have to figure out better customer experiences,
better products to be able to get the most out of all the opportunities that are present with flexibility.
So cool.
Thank you so much,
John.
It's been such a pleasure to have you here in the pod.
I feel that I've learned a lot.
And yeah,
I think it's a great way to start 2026 to see that it's possible to break frontiers.
between the various disciplines.
And yeah,
there is science,
there is very hard science with the part that you're extremely excited about.
And yeah,
on the show,
you've also heard some people talk about social sciences and of course,
even philosophy.
So it all blends really,
really well together.
So...
Thank you,
Sean,
for being the first guest of this new year of Energetic.
And happy new year and all the best with the
Baalbek Insights.
So it's a new project.
It's a continuity.
But yeah,
I'm looking forward to see how it unfolds.
Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Energetic.
It's been a pleasure diving deep into the world of sustainability and the just energy transition with some of the most forward thinking mouths out there.
I'm Maureen Connelly,
your host from Policy Consultancy,
Next Energy Consumer,
and it's been an incredible journey growing this podcast together with you,
our knowledgeable and passionate listeners.
Since 2021,
we've shared countless stories,
insights,
and ideas over more than 40 episodes,
and it's all thanks to your support and enthusiasm.
If you've enjoyed our journey so far and want to help us keep the conversation going,
why not support us on Patreon?
Every bit helps us bring more inspiring content your way.
Check out the show notes for the link.
And hey,
if you're a part of an organization that shares our passion for a sustainable and inclusive energy future,
we're excited to explore sponsorship opportunities with you.
It's a fantastic way to connect with a dedicated audience and make an even bigger impact together.
Shout out to the fantastic
Igor Mikhailovich from Podcast Media Factory.
for his incredible sound design work,
making every episode a joy to listen to.
If you haven't already,
make sure to subscribe to Energetic on your favorite podcast platform.
And if you think a friend or a colleague could benefit from our episode,
we'd love for you to spread the word.
It helps us grow and keep the energy transition conversation alive.
Sharing is caring.
Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to stay engaged and update on all things Energetic.
Thanks once again for lending your ears.
Until next time.