About the guest: Robert Zoufal is a Senior Portfolio Manager in the energy sector and Head of Sales and Customer Success for Inercomp eTools. He provides strategic and operational support to power and gas suppliers in Austria, helping them navigate procurement and marketing challenges in a rapidly changing market. His focus is on delivering pragmatic, customer-centered solutions that create real impact.
As the energy landscape rapidly evolves, residential consumers are no longer just passive electricity users – they are becoming active market participants. In a recent conversation between Christian Steiner, Head of Customer Success at Podero, and Robert Zoufal, Senior Portfolio Manager at Inercomp, Robert shares his perspective on why residential flexibility is quickly becoming a critical lever for utilities, not only for managing volatility and imbalance risk, but also for creating value through smarter short-term trading and intraday optimization. With solar, batteries, and EVs making household demand far less predictable, he explains why better forecasting, active steering of flexibility assets, and the right incentive models will be key to turning residential flexibility into both a risk-management tool and a new source of profit.
Podero: Hi Robert. Thanks for joining us. We’re talking about residential flex today. What do you see happening that’s exciting on the residential flex side?
Robert: I think it’s an extremely exciting moment to talk about residential flex. In fact, circumstances demand that you really get into thinking about how to use residential flex.
Because, just think of it, nowadays consumers are no longer just sitting there and demanding the power, they’re actually becoming prosumers. They start producing energy with their solar panels, they implement battery storage, they have their EVs. So there is a lot in motion where people do not, let’s say, behave in a way which is easily predictable. And this causes a lot of problems.
In the past, it was actually very easy to make a good prediction. You had your standard SLP, you had annual demand, you just rolled it out and finished. Nowadays, people start thinking, okay, now I want to optimize myself, where do I shift my demand? So they’re not that predictable anymore. And here is where residential flex comes in. Because now you have to react to those different behaviors, so that you can avoid imbalance cost – because imbalance cost is what makes things expensive.
And to go one step further, it’s not only necessary to avoid cost, but also to generate real profit. You can remember the last few years, we had several price spikes, which drove spot and entry prices up, which had never been seen before. And if you can shift even a little bit of the household demand into other time slots then, you can already create a huge profit.
Podero: So generating value for users, for customers and also utilities, limiting risk. You’ve mentioned imbalance risk. Do you think this is a big influence for decision makers at utilities… or should it be?
Robert: Actually, it should be. We had these huge difficulties in the last two years with solar metering points, which were causing problems with energy imbalance. And now it’s time to also think about residential consumers, because they will become more and more volatile – and create problems on their own.
Podero: Imbalance and intraday always go hand in hand. You can try to correct the imbalance by moving away from anticipated peaks, but you never know, on the day-ahead. You can correct it on the intraday though. In your experience, is there anything around how you could forecast imbalance positions? Can you forecast them… or how would you react to that?
Robert: Yes, you can – or you have to – react to it, especially with more data. So you have to know more and more about your customers, like do they have solar panels on the roof? When are they typically charging their vehicles? And so on. You have to get to know your customers much better than in the past, because when you know their specific “pasts”, you can also predict the future much better. And then of course there’s other data, like the weather forecast, which you can include into your prediction. All of this is getting more and more important.
Podero: So knowledge is important, right? But how important do you think is the active steering of those devices, of those flexibility assets? Is it important to also control that part?
Robert: Definitely, because this might be also the biggest difference in what we are doing now with the large industrial customers – and what you (Podero) are doing now with your residential customers.
Industrial companies are already thinking about, or actually doing those things; they react to price signals, they’re thinking about processes, how can I switch my demand into time periods with lower prices and avoid high price zones? For residential flex they might have problems to really get it on their own. Then they might need the utilities, so that they can benefit from all the possibilities the energy market is offering now. That’s where steering comes into play, and where it can really activate the potential from residential users.
Podero: There’s a lot that residential can learn from industrial applications. Because this has been in practice for a very long time already. So are big industrial plants adjusting on the day ahead, and are they then using energy differently with whatever machines they are working with?
Robert: Yes, because more and more of them realize that they have the price pressure. There’s a huge similarity between residential and industrial consumers; both are looking for the cheapest price. Everybody’s looking at where they could shift their demand. What industrial consumers are now doing is different than in previous years, where the best strategy was to have a very constant demand over time to use nuclear power plants and all those baseload producers.
Now they are trying to shift as much demand as possible to the middle of the day, because through the increase in PV power plants, we have way too much energy in the system in the middle of the day, so prices are plummeting to levels never seen before.
Podero: I’m assuming you’re doing calculations, also looking ahead how things will develop. This issue is not getting smaller, right? And active management just becomes more important.
Robert: Extremely. As we said before, you need to know more about your customers in the short term for your scheduling, but you also need to know a lot more about your customers for the long term prediction. This is also why Inercomp developed eTools, which basically has a portfolio management system in it, where I can very actively get all the relevant information into my system, and then make a very educated decision on which position I need to hedge for my customers.
Podero: So that is something your industrial customers can use to build their own knowledge base and decide by themselves what is a good decision for tomorrow, or even intraday?
Robert: Correct.
Podero: We cannot do this for residentials; we cannot give them the tool in hand. But we can provide them with information on the apps that they are using, and try to use the flexibility for them. And the customer should care more.
Robert: Yes, but they might not have the incentive. So that’s actually a huge problem because, if you don’t get money out of it, you might say, why should I change my behavior? And I think that’s the very cool thing about Podero, that you give utilities the possibility to really create value out of this residential flexibility.
Help the utility generate their own product, where they can share this additional profit with the household who can say ‘yeah, okay, now it makes sense for me because I get money out of this for changing my behavior’. That’s something, in my opinion, that nearly every utility should think about in the next five to ten years.
Podero: Nice, we think even shorter term, but yes, generally we agree! Thank you.
