Buildings are evolving from passive consumers to active grid resources, helping to balance energy demand during peak hours. The integration of renewable energy sources, battery storage, and EVs into buildings creates virtual power plants that enhance energy flexibility. Member company Edo through building automation systems provides utilities real-time visibility, control, and quantifiable load response. Below we learn a bit more about the company as we talk to Emilie Bolduc, Chief Commercial Officer.

1. Tell us a bit about yourself and your company

I’m the Chief Commercial Officer at Edo, where I focus on helping utilities turn commercial buildings into reliable grid resources. My background is rooted in building strong utility partnerships and translating emerging energy technologies into practical, scalable solutions.

We’ve been talking about VPPs for years, but what feels different now is that 2026 is less about proving and more about operationalizing and scaling. The conversation has shifted from “Can this work?” to “How do we scale this?”

Our role is to transform these buildings from passive loads into strategic grid participants, and to help utilities engage them as dependable grid resources when needed most.

Edo’s technology connects directly with building automation systems to provide utilities real-time visibility, control, and quantifiable load response. These are the foundational building blocks of comprehensive building intelligence.

2. Why is being part of the OpenADR Alliance important to Edo’s strategy?
VPPs have to become operational infrastructure; that only happens with standards.

Utilities need to know that when they dispatch load, it will respond in a predictable way. They can’t build long-term strategies around one-off integrations or vendor-specific workarounds.

Standards are what move flexibility from pilot budgets into core resource plans. OpenADR creates trust and interoperability. Participating in the OpenADR Alliance fits naturally with Edo’s market approach. We believe demand flexibility should look and feel like infrastructure—something planners can count on. It needs to scale across portfolios, not just across a handful of enthusiastic sites.

3. What is a major challenge you’re seeing in the industry today? How is Edo addressing it?

The biggest challenge right now is credibility at scale. Too many projects are still stuck verifying the concept instead of delivering measurable, repeatable performance across large portfolios.

Meanwhile, utilities are facing unprecedented load growth. Commercial buildings are becoming more flexible in how they use energy, and electricity demand is changing fast. If demand flexibility can’t show up in a reliable, predictable manner, planners will default back to traditional generation. Utilities can’t manage growing demand without better data, deeper visibility, and real operational control.

Edo addresses this by focusing on load curve control, not just device aggregation. We model how buildings actually behave, quantify what flexibility is truly available, and consistently deliver. That’s what elevates flexibility from an innovative experiment to a meaningful input in utility planning.

4. Can you elaborate on the role OpenADR plays in Edo’s program with National Grid, which is a three-year demonstration to deploy demand flexibility across New York, supported by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). https://edoenergy.com/featured/grid-interactive-efficient-buildings-new-york/
OpenADR is the communication backbone that makes scalable flexibility possible. Utilities need a clean, standardized way to signal demand events, test performance, and verify outcomes without relying on custom integrations.

In practice, we are seeing it used as the bridge between utility programs and building systems, allowing demand signals to flow directly to us. It is not just about peak events anymore; the real opportunity is continuous operational integration. Understanding how buildings respond over time and incorporating that flexibility into daily grid operations is where the industry is headed, and OpenADR provides the shared language that makes that coordination possible.

Take our demonstration project with National Grid as a great example. This project covers four buildings, all on constrained feeders. Edo integrates directly with Energy Hub who is the DERMS provider for National Grid. OpenADR is the communication protocol used to dispatch load from our participant buildings and it allows for the entire process to be automated and friction free. 

National Grid will be calling events in various seasons but primarily when those local feeders are reaching threshold levels of demand. Having grid interactive building assets integrated into their DERMs using OpenADR means National Grid simply triggers the event, and the signal flows all the way down to Edo’s platform, which automatically dispatches the target building or buildings. If National Grid wants to call multiple events across feeders on the same day, or on back-to-back days, OpenADR ensures that dispatch requests are not mixed up or lost in email, which is a problem when VPPs are executed manually.  

For more information, please visit https://edoenergy.com