Smart Grid Today Podcast

Opower is a behavioral energy efficiency company acquired a couple years ago by Oracle Utilities and that basically invented using behavioral science for the utility industry. The big recent headline about Opower was that late last year it reached a remarkable milestone - 20 terawatt hours (TWH) of energy saved for electric utility customers, up from 11 TWH saved at the time of the acquisition. Our guests were Marisa Uchin, vice president of global regulatory affairs and Julia Lundin, director of solution strategy for the Opower solution, both with Oracle Utilities. Both joined Oracle with the Opower acquisition and they explained how the company evolved from way back in the days when Uchin was employed at Pacific Gas & Electric doing energy efficiency programs and saw the brilliance of what this startup firm, now called Opower, was offering. We also heard what Oracle is planning to offer its utility clients next including peak savings and machine learning – that can detect when a customer buys a new EV a