Electric power orchestration for businesses and residences is potentially a killer app that disrupts the energy management status quo, addresses grid-scale energy problems, and generates significant ROI for ratepayers. As we’ll cover in more detail below, orchestration can do this because it time-shifts energy consumption in response to variable market prices while optimizing the benefits of on-site batteries and renewables.

This research note explains the urgent need for intelligently orchestrating energy use, storage, and generation in industrial and residential settings, explains how practical orchestration systems work, and analyzes the potential cost savings and societal benefits. Mobile network infrastructure giant Ericsson is already delivering site energy orchestration solutions for its telecom customers in multiple countries—and demonstrating compelling financial benefits. Using Ericsson as an example, we’ll show how other industries, and even residential properties, can achieve comparable results.

Orchestration means reacting to real-time electric grid conditions by intelligently controlling when to use, generate, and store electricity. From an electric supply standpoint, flattening demand curves by time-shifting loads away from periods of peak consumption reduces the need for future power plants while helping to avoid blackouts and overload situations. Electric utilities worldwide are struggling to manage increasing demand while simultaneously transitioning to renewable energy sources. Reducing the peak demand on these utilities creates significant savings that grid operators pass along to customers as incentives, and those incentives in turn generate ROI that more than justifies the orchestration investments. In other words, Ericsson has validated the business case for industrial-scale energy orchestration.

Situation: Grid-Scale Load Leveling

Let’s begin at the root of the problem: grid-scale load leveling. Wind and solar energy generate clean, cheap electricity, but only when the wind blows and the sun shines. Renewable sources generate about 29% of the world’s electricity supply today, a number that’s projected to increase to 65% by 2030, according to the United Nations. Further complicating the situation, power demands for U.S. vehicle electrification and datacenters will also more than double over that period, increasing to 6.8% of U.S. electricity consumption (RystadEnergy). Consequently, electric utilities are eager for new, clean, practical strategies that reduce peak demand while minimizing reliance on fossil fuels.

Decades ago, utilities implemented the first demand-response programs to reduce peak power consumption. These simple systems control customers’ HVAC thermostat settings and switch off other big loads in exchange for rate reductions. Despite the financial incentives, only about 6% of residential customers take advantage of these programs, mainly because consumers won’t sacrifice comfort and don’t trust external control of personal energy use. Demand-response adoption for business customers is negligible (about 0.17%, according to Statista) because external control of industrial equipment creates unacceptable business continuity problems.

Introducing On-Site Energy Orchestration

Orchestration replaces utility-initiated demand-response with local, intelligent, situation-aware, fine-grained control over electric use, storage, and generation. Here’s how it works. Utilities provide customers with price-based demand-response (PBDR) information. PBDR provides time-varying energy rates (TVR) and real-time pricing (RTP) based on grid conditions. Armed with PBDR rates, orchestration systems intelligently optimize electric consumption, storage, and generation without impacting convenience, comfort, or on-site operations.

Here’s a simple consumption example. Instead of specifying when to charge an EV, consumers can say when they need to use the car and let the orchestrator figure out when to charge it at the lowest cost. As for storage and generation, on-site power storage (EVs, lithium-ion battery arrays) and photovoltaic (PV) cells provide flexibility to further reduce peak loads by using and selling locally stored and generated power when electric rates are high.

The following section provides a practical example of a leading industrial supplier (Ericsson) offering its customers (mobile network operators) the equipment, software, and expertise to orchestrate energy use, storage, and generation intelligently—without affecting mobile services. We’ll outline the business case for orchestration, describe Ericsson’s solution, review the potential cost savings, list the technical prerequisites, and suggest how Ericsson’s approach applies to other vertical industries.

Ericsson Site Energy Orchestration

The hypothesis that energy orchestration is a killer app requires economic validation, so let’s do some simple math. Using the telecom industry as a case in point, the millions of cell sites in operation worldwide consume over 220 TWh of energy, about 1% of the world’s total consumption of electricity (Ericsson, GSMA).

So, how much of the 220 TWh total demand can orchestration save? The answer surprised me. Ericsson has worked on mobile network site energy orchestration for about five years and deployed solutions in Europe, the U.S., and Australia. These first-of-a-kind field installations report significant cost savings. The table below compares the benefits of using three different orchestration strategies. A simple “peak shaving” approach that limits consumption during intervals of peak energy cost generated savings of up to 8%. Adding more aggressive load shifting to avoid periods of high energy costs yielded savings up to 25%. Combining peak shaving, rate shifting, batteries, and alternate power sources resulted in up to 36% savings.

Now, back to the business case. How much money can mobile operators save with orchestration? Here’s my most optimistic estimate for 2030 (in 2024 dollars). In the U.S., the average cost of electricity is 23 cents per kWh, or $230 million per TWh (EnergySage). Average savings across the industry could approach 30% as cell sites upgrade to lithium batteries (MI&S estimate), saving a total of $15 billion annually worldwide ($360 million in the U.S.). Potential savings would increase as electric rates rise, as utilities double down on PBDR incentives, and as mobile operators add generation and storage to the mix, creating new revenue opportunities by selling excess power back to the grid.

From this thought experiment we can see that the income side of the orchestration use case looks good, so now let’s look at implementation costs in the telecom industry.

Site Orchestration Architecture

We begin by looking at Ericsson’s site orchestration system from top to bottom. At the highest level, network operators augment existing systemwide site management tools with intelligent energy orchestration. Situationally aware, AI-driven algorithms at central sites monitor electric grid conditions, energy exchanges and spot markets, weather forecasts, TVRs, RTP, on-site battery and generation capacity, and mobile network operations. The intelligent orchestrator considers all of these factors to determine the optimal energy profile for each RAN site. The orchestrator communicates with on-site Ericsson Network Manager (ENM) systems to control and monitor all RAN equipment, ancillary equipment (e.g., HVAC), energy storage systems, and renewable power sources.

Note that RAN control is fine-grained. For example, the ENM can turn off specific frequency bands to save power. This sounds complicated and technical (and it is), but it’s cost-effective and scalable because the software runs mostly on existing network and RAN management systems. Ancillary equipment such as HVAC, batteries, and renewable sources require “smart” connectivity to the ENM controller, but most of those capabilities are already available.

Orchestration has three external deployment barriers—two significant implementation dependencies and one major CapEx “opportunity.”

1. Electric utility PBDR commitment — Electric utilities must (1) offer attractive price incentives for peak shaving and load shifting, and (2) provide real-time rate APIs. Utilities are highly motivated to do this because of the pressures already noted, but regulated industries move slowly.
2. Standards — There are tens of thousands of electric utilities (over 3,000 in the U.S. alone), so efficient orchestration needs unified interface standards. The OpenADR Alliance and IEEE are working on the problem, but standards are likewise always slow.
3. Lithium-ion — Higher levels of energy orchestration savings depend on robust energy storage, and lead-acid batteries can’t do the job. Operators are already transitioning to lithium-ion at all RAN sites, but it’ll take several more years, particularly in the U.S.

Energy Orchestration in Other Vertical Industries

Ericsson’s groundbreaking work on this problem in the telecom industry validates the fundamental energy orchestration business case and serves as a model for other vertical industries. Although each vertical has unique technical architecture and business models, all energy orchestration solutions share these same core business and technical requirements:

• Utility company enablement — Variable electricity pricing with real-time rate access
• On-site equipment monitoring and control — Fine-grained control over all equipment
• Intelligent orchestration — Comprehensive situational context including detailed operational objectives, practical constraints, equipment status, and weather—plus autonomous, AI-based optimization logic
• User experience – Easy, intuitive, and appropriate for each vertical—specifying outcomes, not actions

Although utility enablement is not industry-specific, the other three requirements are. Telecom has advantages here: consistent operational equipment configurations (often single-supplier), existing multi-site control systems with centralized coordination, and on-site power sources. Most other verticals have more equipment diversity, greater coordination complexity, and less power diversity. We’ll cover specific orchestration opportunities for other vertical industries in a future article. Meanwhile, please refer to this research paper for more information about residential (consumer) use cases.

Widespread Site-Level Energy Orchestration Needs to Happen

Ericsson has demonstrated a practical use case for orchestrating electrical power at telecom RAN sites. Using Ericsson’s experience as a model, visionary companies in other vertical industries should evaluate the technical feasibility and ROI potential of implementing similar strategies. As more businesses orchestrate power usage, the benefits become grid-scale, with public policy implications that benefit everyone.