Part 4: Revenue Reimagined—From Squeeze to Synergy
By Oleg Popovsky and Velvet Voelz
This series, From Grid Disjointedness to Grid Orchestration, explores the renewable energy industry’s evolution—from unresponsive assets and fragmented infrastructure to AI-augmented strategies for resilient, responsive, and affordable power that produces stable and attractive returns.
The final piece in our four-part series brings the story full circle—from utilization to monetization—where we explore how orchestration can finally pay for itself.
Why Now: The Grid’s Inflection Point
The grid’s evolution has always been about motion: electrons, capital, and ideas.
But today, the real movement isn’t physical. It’s economic.
Short-term markets are flattening—squeezing volatility and arbitrage margins. At the same time, forward curves are climbing—a paradox that prices-in a future of capacity constraints and supply uncertainty.
It’s a tale of two markets: one rewarding flexibility and, the other, rewarding foresight. Yet neither fully rewards coordination.
The tools are here. The hardware can handle it, the software can orchestrate it, and the intelligence is catching up.
We’re sitting on gigawatts of trapped value behind market rules, not physics.
So why haven’t we seen grid orchestration play out to its full potential?
Because the system wasn’t built to reward it.
Scale remains a challenge: as PV, EVs, and batteries reach critical mass, aggregation remains costly and complex. We have proven that distributed resources can deliver capacity AND reliability, but most remain stranded from the markets and wholesale value streams.
Incentives are misaligned. Utilities still earn by building, not optimizing, making VPPs and non-wire alternatives an uphill sell.
Meanwhile, rate payers don’t earn enough to change behaviour. And, DSO-style market structures—where local flexibility could actually be monetized—largely exist on paper only.
And yet, the pressure is building.
Data centers, EV fleets, and flexible industrial loads are now the fastest movers on the grid. They can shift or shed loads in seconds, and change demand profiles faster than any generator can ramp.
The orchestration tech exists; the business models to reward them are missing.
As Sarah Kapnick at J.P. Morgan argues in her Climate Intuition series, "success in the “new climate era” will go to organisations that can integrate system risk and operational flexibility into everyday decision-making. In other words: the tools are ready, the actors are shifting. The question becomes how the economics, governance and coordination are going to catch up.
The Opportunity: True Orchestration and the Efficiency Breakthrough
If we don’t fix this now, we risk overspending (massively) on new transmission and generation capacity.
The payoff for fixing it, however, would be enormous: a more-efficient grid, cheaper electricity for ratepayers and a surge of innovation for a smarter, more investible energy economy.
The tailwinds are finally blowing in the right direction:
Granular nodal pricing—at the distribution level, where flexibility (actually) lives.
Load flexibility—finally monetizable not just theoretical
15-minute day-ahead markets—proving out in Europe to reduce imbalance risk
FERC 2222 supporting DER aggregation in wholesale markets
This next phase is no longer “just” about decarbonization. It’s about efficiency, and aligning economics with intelligence.
Here’s how I often explain it:
You charge your EV overnight when prices are lowest. Tomorrow, a grocery store might offer you a credit to discharge some of that power into its battery during a local price spike, converting that stored energy into its own kind of currency.
Behind that exchange sits an orchestration engine—forecasting, signaling, and aligning incentives between driver, store, and grid operator. That’s “true orchestration” in practice where technology, market design, and human behavior finally meet in real time.
That’s the heart of this discussion: building business models that recognize—and reward—that flow of coordinated value.
How Technology Expands the Pie
The growth engine of our grid isn’t steel or silicon—it’s synchronization.
New orchestration platforms are showing that value doesn’t just flow from generation — it’s also created by making the grid smarter.
Camus Energy helps utilities operate like orchestrators, combining grid-edge visibility with market participation
Alectra Inc.’s Centricity initiative reframes utilities as flexibility managers
GridBeyond and Voltus are showing that aggregating demand-side flexibility can perform like generation (dispatchable, measurable, and monetizable).
Across the AI & Energy Market Landscape by Remarkable Ventures, new players are blurring the line between energy tech and financial services:
AI forecasting (AutoGrid, Amperon ), DER optimization (Molecule Systems Leap Energy, Enersponse), orchestration infrastructure (Camus Energy, GridBeyond, @gridX) are all converging around one thesis: the grid’s next trillion-dollar opportunity lies in orchestrating flexibility, in addition to generation capacity.
Turning Orchestration into Revenue
The next frontier isn’t building more power generation. It’s monetizing the coordination of electricity flow.
When generation, storage, and flexible loads are synchronized new value streams appear:
Flexibility as revenue—participants earn for adapting, not just producing
Shared savings—congestion avoided is margin created.
Local flexibility markets—distribution-level pricing rewards grid-edge actions.
Portfolio optimization—AI orchestration improves capture rates, cuts imbalance risks.
Data and visibility—transparency itself is becoming a monetizable data (and products)
That’s the good news. But, most orchestration platforms still sell like SaaS—dashboards, licenses, integration fees. Safe and predictable…but, uninspired.
The real breakthrough will come when business models mirror the grid dynamics they serve: dynamic, performance-based, and data-driven.
That is when Orchestration-as-a-Service will take shape—shared-value agreements tied to performance, dispatch compensation, and APIs that turn market response into upside.
Emerging players, like Molecule, GridBeyond, and Voltus are already signaling this shift. From software tools to strategic engines, measured (and monetized) by outcomes, not dashboards.
Looking Ahead
Across this series, Velvet and I have traced the grid’s evolution—from distributed generation and forecasting to orchestration and now monetization.
Part 4 closes that loop—and opens the question of what comes next.
The grid’s transformation from optimization for the system to monetization through the system marks an inflextion point we’ve been building toward.
Players who figure out how to turn flexibility, intelligence, and coordination into recurring revenue will define the next decade of innovation across the electricity value chain.
The technology is readily available. The market incentive shifts are underway. Now it’s about designing the business models that monetize effective orchestration.
Personal Lense—Finding Purpose in the Noise
After 15 years developing, financing, and integrating distributed energy systems, I’ve come to see orchestration as less about technology and more about timing—aligning people, capital, and incentives to move in sync.
Writing this series with Velvet has been a way to stay focused while reconnecting with why I entered this field in the first place: helping great ideas scale before policy cycles or pricing gaps get in the way.
For me, this isn't just analysis—it’s reconnaissance for what comes next. I’m observing where real progress happens and where alignment still lags. At this stage of my career, I’m choosing to work with companies whose people, purpose, and projects I align with—advising, connecting, and co-shaping ideas that can endure beyond cycles and headlines.
Because the real opportunity now isn’t just in electrons (or AI). It’s in orchestrating trust—across technologies, business models, and human priorities.
The Series in Four Moves
Part 1: Utilization—DERs as data and optimization engines
Part 2: Forecasting—From prediction to active influence
Part 3: Orchestration—Managing multi-layer complexity
Part 4: Monetization—Turning coordination into revenue
And with that, our journey from bi-directional to multi-layered comes full circle. Velvet Voelz and my next chapter isn’t another Part; it’s the one we build by putting orchestration to work.
Curious how you see this playing out—who captures value in a fully orchestrated grid? Operators, platforms, capital providers etc.?
Velvet Voelz, is an energy asset management expert who advances forecasting, revenue optimization and operational strategies in evolving power markets.
Oleg Popovsky is a founder and strategic advisor to cleantech companies focused on energy intelligence, DER monetization, and infrastructure innovation.
This article was originally published on Linkedin.