Making behind-the-meter DERs visible in GIS: Lessons from North American utilities

At DISTRIBUTECH International 2026 (DTECH 2026), one theme consistently surfaced in conversations with utility innovation leaders, operations teams, and GIS professionals: AI-enabled insights must not remain trapped in silos if they are to benefit the grid.

At the NET2GRID booth, together with TechBlocks, that principle was brought to life. The joint demonstration showed how NET2GRID EnergyAI® residential DER behavioral and location insights can be embedded directly within a utility’s existing GIS environment, bringing behind-the-meter intelligence into the same ArcGIS platforms utilities use every day.

Now that DTECH 2026 has wrapped, we asked Sean Bredin of TechBlocks and Emily Fisher of NET2GRID to reflect on the key lessons emerging from those conversations.

Lesson 1: What Utilities See Today, and What’s Missing

For many North American utilities, GIS is the system of record for grid context. It’s where teams go to understand feeder topology, asset constraints, interconnection capacity, and long-term planning assumptions. In regions like Ontario, utilities are also required to publish system capacity maps using ArcGIS as part of broader regulatory and market mandates, according to Electric

Autonomy Canada.

But while GIS holds the grid model, much of the intelligence shaping the modern grid still lives elsewhere.

“What became clear after DTECH is that this isn’t just a product conversation, it’s an engineering one. To unlock the value of streaming grid and household data, you need intentional layering between data ingestion, model coordination, and business outcome orchestration. Without that, AI remains trapped inside siloed applications,” says Sean.

Another theme running through the event was the quiet tension between platform lock-in and intelligent interoperability.

“For years, vendors have tried to centralize customer data into a single SaaS environment. But AI is pushing back on that model. The real opportunity is a coordinated intelligence layer that pulls sub-second data from multiple systems and turns it into outcomes.’’

Lesson two: Design for the GIS User

The second major lesson started with integration design. Successful GIS integration begins with the GIS user, not the data model. For the joint TechBlocks and NET2GRID demo, that meant presenting residential DER insights as intuitive, governed GIS layers that could be toggled on within existing workflows, rather than forcing users into separate dashboards or reports. “You don’t design that future from a portal outward. You design it backward from outcomes, powered by streaming data like what we demonstrated with NET2GRID,” says Sean.

A third insight quickly followed: behind-the-meter DER intelligence becomes exponentially more powerful once it is spatial. When NET2GRID's residential energy insights, disaggregation, and DER detection capabilities are mapped directly onto utility-owned grid assets behavioral data informs operational decisions. Reporting from the ground, Emily says: “Teams reacted strongly to visualizations showing transformer overloading threats, neighborhoods with non-wires alternatives potential, and opportunities for orchestration that could break down data silos between customer and grid stakeholders within the utility enterprise.”

Lesson 3: Scalability is not optional

The third lesson from Distributech was clear: scalability must be built in from day one.

From the outset, TechBlocks and NET2GRID aligned on an ESRI-native approach, emphasizing reusable APIs and compatibility with both ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Enterprise. The demo was architected with real-world deployment in mind, ensuring that the same patterns could support enterprise expansion without rework.

“We’re entering a brave new phase of grid intelligence. Real-time data from behind-the-meter applications like NET2GRID enables entirely new products and customer experiences, but only if it’s layered into an agentic framework that can reason, act, and coordinate across systems. That’s a fundamentally different paradigm than traditional SaaS,” says Sean.

This isn’t just incremental improvement, it’s architectural evolution.

Looking ahead

As the industry moves forward, both leaders see a broader structural shift underway. “NET2GRID EnergyAI™ is a flexible intelligence component that fits into the utility technology landscape across the enterprise, from customer to grid to new orchestration layers that have yet to be conceptualized. This kind of mentality is what is shaping the grid modernization vision for the next frontier of agentic tools and interfaces where these valuable insights can live,” says Emily Fisher of NET2GRID.

“AI is decentralizing intelligence. The winners won’t be the platforms that lock in data; they’ll be the ones that enable orchestration. In this new model, intelligence lives above the applications, not inside them,” says Sean Bredin of TechBlocks.

If DTECH 2026 revealed anything, it’s this: the future of grid intelligence won’t be defined by who owns the platform, but by who can orchestrate insight where the grid and the customer converge.