Beyond EVs and solar: What’s next for grid edge intelligence?
Beyond central power stations and utility-scale renewables, the energy transition is also happening behind the meter. Electric vehicles (EVs), rooftop solar and other distributed energy resources (DERs) are changing how electricity is produced and consumed at the edge of the grid. Yet for many utilities, visibility into these assets remains limited.
That creates a growing gap between what is happening in the home and what utilities can actually see at the grid level. Grid edge intelligence can help close that gap.
From smart meters to distributed intelligence
Traditional AMI gives utilities valuable consumption data. But as DER adoption grows, knowing how much electricity a household consumes is no longer enough. Utilities increasingly need to understand what is shaping power dynamics behind the meter, whether through EV consumption, solar PV generation, battery charge/discharge cycles, or other flexible assets.
This is where distributed intelligence and AI-powered energy disaggregation become increasingly important.
NET2GRID’s recent partnerships with Sagemcom and Honeywell are compelling examples of this shift as more and more metering providers recognize the necessity of enabling grid edge solutions. The collaborations bring NET2GRID EnergyAI® together with Sagemcom’s meter-agnostic smart metering platform and Honeywell’s next-gen A4Pro meter, with an initial focus on detecting and managing EV and solar PV installations.
The goal is straightforward: turn existing smart meter infrastructure into a source of more detailed, accurate, real-time, and actionable grid intelligence.
Meter agnostic intelligence across AMI1.0 and AMI2.0
Not every utility is starting at the same point. The partnerships of NET2GRID with metering vendors across the ecosystem are designed to support utilities at different stages of their AMI journey.
For utilities using existing AMI 1.0 infrastructure, NET2GRID EnergyAI® DER analytics can already use available smart meter data in the cloud to provide greater visibility into assets such as EVs, solar PV, HVAC, and electrified heating and cooling.
For AMI 2.0, the collaboration brings intelligence directly to the grid edge today. By deploying NET2GRID EnergyAI® edge models on Sagemcom’s Siconia DI platform, or natively on Honeywell’s next-gen A4Pro meters, utilities can run containerized grid edge applications directly on smart meter hardware, providing a scalable foundation as new edge use cases emerge.
The broader idea is flexibility: enabling utilities to build on the infrastructure they already have while progressively introducing new applications and use cases as their needs evolve.
What comes after EV and solar detection?
EVs and solar PV are only part of the picture. As utilities gain greater visibility into behind-the-meter assets, the next opportunity is to build a broader understanding of the flexible resources connected to the low-voltage grid.
Looking ahead, the partnership could expand into additional areas of residential energy intelligence, helping utilities gain greater visibility into distributed energy resources, flexible loads, and evolving household energy consumption.
The important shift is not simply detecting more devices. It is moving toward a grid where utilities can understand which assets exist, where they are located, how they affect local demand, and where flexibility may be available.
A day in the life: Operating the grid of the future
Behind-the-meter visibility changes how utility teams run the grid on a daily basis. Instead of relying on static estimates or reacting to outage reports, control rooms, planning engineers, and customer teams can act on granular, real-time asset intelligence:
Proactive Grid Management: Instead of reacting to low-voltage complaints or transformer alarms after the fact, grid operators can monitor entire fleets of EV chargers, heat pumps, and solar installations in near real-time, rebalancing phases and resolving thermal stress before physical hardware fails.
Data-Driven Investment: Distribution planners replace conservative, worst-case load assumptions with actual asset behavior. Factoring solar output, battery discharge, and HVAC cycles into feeder models allows engineers to pinpoint genuine network constraints, defer unnecessary capital expenditure, and upgrade infrastructure with precision.
Enhanced Customer Engagement: Customer teams replace broad, generic energy alerts with targeted engagement. Utilities can automatically provide EV owners with personalized off-peak charging schedules or invite solar households on specific constrained feeders to participate in local flexibility programs.
The next generation of the intelligent grid
The future of grid intelligence will not be defined by a single device or application. It will be about creating an ecosystem in which existing AMI infrastructure can support new applications as the grid evolves.
That is the opportunity behind pairing NET2GRID EnergyAI® with next-generation platforms like Sagemcom’s Siconia DI and Honeywell’s A4Pro: bringing greater visibility to the grid edge, starting with EVs and solar, and creating a path toward broader DER intelligence.
As more energy resources move behind the meter, the question for utilities is no longer simply “How much energy is being used?”. It is: “What is happening behind the meter, and how can we use that intelligence to build a more flexible grid?”
Want to learn more about how NET2GRID EnergyAI® brings intelligence to the grid edge?
