At Kaluza’s first Breakfast Club in London, leaders from across energy, automotive, investment and policy came together to discuss one of the most important questions in the future energy system: who owns the flexible customer?
The discussion brought together perspectives from BMW Group, OVO Energy, SET Ventures, Energy UK and Kaluza, covering the role of OEMs, retailers, investors, policymakers and technology platforms in scaling flexibility. The conversation ranged from EVs and smart charging to customer trust, regulation, market design and the economics of flexibility.
What emerged was a clear tension. The technology needed to scale flexibility is increasingly in place. EV adoption is growing, connected devices are becoming more common, AI is reducing the cost of building and operating sophisticated platforms, and electricity systems are becoming more dynamic. Yet only a fraction of the potential is being realised today.
The main barriers are no longer purely technical. They are structural, commercial and human. The challenge is not proving that flexibility works. It is making it work at mass-market scale.
Solve for what customers need
Flexibility is often framed as a behaviour-change challenge: how do we persuade people to shift demand, charge at different times or respond to price signals?
But most customers do not want to participate in energy markets. They want lower bills, confidence that their car will be charged when they need it, and a service that works without constant input.
That distinction matters. The best products will not expose more information or ask for more engagement. They will automate complexity and deliver better outcomes in the background.
Orchestration matters more than ownership
As expected from the topic of the event - much of the debate has focused on who owns the customer relationship: the retailer, the OEM, the platform provider or the aggregator. But no single player controls the full experience.
OEMs control the vehicle. Retailers control the tariff. Networks understand system constraints. Software platforms increasingly coordinate optimisation and market participation. The customer experiences all of this as one journey, even when the industry behind it is fragmented.
That is why orchestration is becoming so important. The real value sits in connecting devices, tariffs, grid signals and customer preferences into a service that feels simple, reliable and worthwhile.
EVs are becoming part of the energy system
Electric vehicles are still often discussed as part of the transport transition, but their role in the energy system is becoming just as important.
As Kaluza’s CEO Stephen Fitzpatrick put it, the internal combustion engine was the perfect partner for oil. It created a vast, dependable source of demand for petrol and diesel, helping to shape the old energy system around extraction, refining and distribution.
Electric vehicles will play an equivalent role for the new energy system. They are the perfect partner for renewables because they bring storage and flexibility to a system increasingly powered by variable generation. When millions of EV batteries can be intelligently coordinated, they can help absorb clean power when it is abundant, reduce demand when the grid is under pressure and ultimately make renewable electricity easier to balance.
Without that intelligence layer, EVs are simply additional load. With it, they become one of the most important forms of distributed infrastructure in a cleaner, more dynamic electricity system.
The market now has to catch up
The ingredients for flexibility at scale are increasingly in place: connected assets, smarter platforms, growing EV adoption, expanding market access and rising pressure on the grid.
The harder task is making those ingredients work together in a way that customers understand and trust. That means designing for outcomes, not interfaces, and building services that remove complexity rather than passing it on.
Flexibility is ready. Now the market has to make it simple enough to scale.
