Brattle Q&A: Energy Leaders & Innovators
Sense CEO Mike Phillips on Smart Meters and How Real-Time Data Can Transform Home Energy Usage

Sanem: I’ve been following Sense since its early days. Could you share your company’s mission and provide an overview of how the product and software have evolved over time, since its founding in 2013?

Mike: At Sense, our mission is to empower people and utilities to better understand and manage energy use so that together, we can reduce global carbon emissions. We envision a world where real-time energy insights would help individuals and communities make smarter decisions.

Over the years, our software has evolved significantly. Initially focused on providing home energy insights through consumer-installed hardware, we’ve grown to embed our technology in next-generation smart meters.

Sense pioneered real-time load disaggregation for homes. While there have been a number of products providing historical device category estimates, most of these products have relied on low-resolution data, which is not sufficient for real-time appliance-level breakdowns – e.g., the microwave just turned on, or the dryer finished the drying cycle. Sense solved this by using very high-resolution data (up to one million samples per second) and advanced machine learning to increasingly provide real-time device-level information, which is made available to consumers in an engaging mobile application. Consumers use this application to find energy savings in their homes and better participate in demand flexibility programs, and, through software interfaces, Sense is able to automate smart devices in the home.

By providing this capability at the grid edge and through the smart meters, customers will automatically have access to the energy usage feedback as soon as their smart meters are deployed. If we assume these capabilities are embedded in all smart meters that will be deployed going forward and use a conservative assumption that about a third of customers engage in Sense-enabled apps, the annual conservation benefit derived from Sense-enabled smart meters (before accounting for any of the load flexibility benefits) could exceed $1.3 billion annually by the end of the decade as estimated by Brattle’s study. For comparison, California spends about $1 billion a year on energy efficiency programs.

By integrating high-resolution data capabilities into the grid, Sense will enable utilities to enhance their planning and optimize infrastructure, and the Sense consumer experience will be available to all customers with no need for additional hardware in the home. Our development has always been about bridging the gap between consumers and the grid, fostering a collaborative path toward decarbonization.

Sanem: How does the availability of real-time, high-resolution data address the limitations of traditional energy usage feedback? And what is the benefit of providing load disaggregation at the grid edge through the software embedded in smart meters?

Mike: Traditional energy feedback systems rely on aggregated or delayed data, which makes it hard for consumers and utilities to act in meaningful ways. Without a real-time view (meaning delays of only a second or less), consumers are unable to associate actions in their homes with what they see in an application. Sense-enabled smart meters change this by supporting local processing of high-resolution data. With our technology, consumers can turn something on or off in their homes and see the effect on their energy consumption, and utilities can see what is happening in their grid in real-time.

Embedded load disaggregation at the grid edge transforms these meters from simple data collection devices into the distributed sensing, computing, and control platform for the next-generation grid. Utilities can have a real-time view of bidirectional power flow in their entire grid – all the way to the end devices in homes. In addition, utilities can gain visibility into faults and failures in the grid. This granularity reduces waste, improves load management, enables more responsive and efficient grid operations, and can be a major driver of increasing grid capacity to handle the needs of the energy transition.

With the latest generation of meters, all of this can be done through software on meters (which can be provided as over-the-air updates) – so the grid edge infrastructure can adapt over time without costly hardware upgrades.

Sanem: From my perspective, earlier smart meter rollouts often faced skepticism, especially since customers had to cover the costs through their rates, and benefits took time to emerge. Are Sense-enabled smart meters different in that they deliver more immediate value to customers?

Mike: You’re absolutely right. One of the key differentiators of Sense-enabled smart meters is the quick value they provide to customers. Once the software understands the devices running in a home, it delivers real-time insights directly to homeowners, allowing them to see which devices are consuming energy, how to reduce costs, and what steps they can take to be more energy-efficient – all right away.

Utilities across the US have recognized this potential. Notably, we’ve partnered with several forward-thinking utilities – such as National Grid in New York and Massachusetts and Tipmont, a rural electric membership cooperative in Indiana – as they roll out these meters, ensuring their customers start seeing benefits from day one. While I can’t share all of what’s to come here, I can say that adoption is growing rapidly as utilities see the combined value of improved customer satisfaction and enhanced grid visibility.

Sanem: What are the projected economic and environmental benefits of providing real-time, device-specific information in conjunction with load flexibility programs and virtual power plants (VPPs)?

Mike: Real-time consumer and grid visibility certainly have an important role to play in virtual power plants. In some work we did with OhmConnect (now Renew Home), we saw that Sense plus OhmConnect achieved approximately 2.5x event savings compared to OhmConnect alone, which validated the benefits of providing real-time, device-specific information to customers in conjunction with incentives to reduce demand.

However, we think over time this goes way beyond how VPPs are currently thought of – instead of just looking at overall supply and demand on the grid, we are working toward localized and real-time load flexibility. So, as there are more and more distributed resources, and as consumers adopt new electric loads such as EVs and heat pumps, the constraints on the grid will include not just overall supply and demand, but also capacity problems with substations, feeder lines, distribution transformers, and even the service feeds into homes.

By embedding intelligence and control at the edge of the grid, we can use a distributed approach to avoid peaks and capacity constraints throughout the system. Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimated that $21 trillion needs to be spent globally on the grid between now and 2050 – and that 24% of this should be spent on making the grid more intelligent. We believe most of that belongs at the very edge of the network (so, in meters).

Sanem: When I think of Sense solutions, I primarily associate them with the intelligence and insights they offer regarding customer load within the home. However, from our recent discussions, it seems there’s significant potential for meters equipped with Sense software to deliver localized grid intelligence. Could you elaborate on your vision for Sense as a solution for improved distribution planning?

Mike: In addition to the potential for real-time and distributed control we were just discussing, yes, detailed data from the edge of the grid should play an important role in planning and forecasting.

By being able to track distributed resources and individual loads and considering the degree to which these can respond to conditions in the grid, planners and forecasters can better predict future needs and plan upgrades – which can include the need for additional control of these resources.

And, while the first-order effect is to track power flow throughout the grid, we also see the benefits of using high-resolution data to track power quality in increasing detail. For example, energy in higher harmonics caused by inverter-based resources can cause heating and aging beyond just the overall power flow.

In addition, many faults and failures in the grid show up as voltage disturbances at the edge of the grid. Vegetation hitting power lines, intermittent arcing in transformers or power lines, and, of course, outages all disrupt voltage downstream of the event. While some of this can be done with existing smart meter data, by measuring and processing power at very high resolution at the edge of the grid, software like Sense can not only detect anomalies and outages but can predict and localize faults when they do happen. The details of the signals provide some information about the fault, but the real power is when we are able to see the effect of the fault or failure across the pool of meters at the edge since we are able to use this to localize the problem in the topology of the grid.

Sanem: That sounds very promising, especially as localized grid planning is increasingly becoming a necessity rather than a “good-to-have” for many jurisdictions. What’s next for Sense in this journey?

Mike: These next-generation meter rollouts are happening now, and we will soon have dramatically more grid edge data than any of us has seen before. We are already processing 50 million times as much data as AMI 1.0 on a per-home basis and will soon be processing that across entire distribution systems. We are excited to use this as the basis for deepening our partnerships with utilities, expanding our software’s capabilities, and exploring new applications of AI-driven insights.

Beyond technology, our focus is on creating better customer experiences. By empowering individuals to take control of their energy use while supporting utilities with actionable insights, we’re building the foundation for a brighter, more sustainable energy future. This journey is just beginning, and we’re excited to lead the way with our utility partners who share this vision.