In a recent episode of our Blueprints Podcast, Madeline Darst, Redaptive’s Head of Enterprise Operations, sat down with board member Audrey Lee to discuss how the electrical grid is evolving—and what it means for commercial and industrial organizations making infrastructure decisions today. The two energy leaders discussed long-term risk, the role of financing in scaling clean energy, and why customer behavior ultimately matters more than regulatory timelines.
Listen to the full conversation or read the recap below.
The headlines focus on AI and data center demand, but that’s only part of the story.
“A lot of commercial and industrial customers are electrifying,” says Audrey Lee, CEO of Lyra Power Technologies and a Redaptive board member since 2021. “And that’s creating a lot of load growth—electrification of transportation, homes, and businesses. We can’t forget that.”
Lee’s perspective carries weight. Before launching Lyra, she spent four years at Microsoft on data center energy strategy, built the grid services business at Sunrun, and worked at the California Public Utilities Commission and Department of Energy. She’s seen the grid from every angle—and she’s worried about one thing in particular.
“With the grid, I’m very concerned about stranded assets,” Lee says. “These are assets that last for decades and have costs that will affect a lot of customers.”
The Fork in the Road
Lee describes the current moment as “a fork in the road.” On one side: corporate leadership in clean energy procurement. Companies investing in solar, wind, batteries, hydro, and geothermal technology. On the other: companies investing in behind-the-meter fossil generation, deploying gas and diesel generators quickly to meet urgent demand.
“I hope we lean more on the former side than on the other,” Lee says. “Especially because these are assets that last for decades.”
The concern is financial, not ideological. Utilities advocating for new natural gas plants are locking in infrastructure that ratepayers will fund for decades—even if cleaner alternatives become more competitive during that time.
Related: Listen to PwC and Redaptive discuss how to manage energy costs while mitigating long-term risk amid an uncertain macroeconomic climate.
Customers Drive the Market
If the regulatory environment moves slowly, what actually drives change? Lee’s answer: customers.
“Customers will vote with their purse,” she says. “If we can bring down the cost of adoption through technology and financing, customers will choose the best solution for themselves.”
Change the economics, remove the friction, and adoption follows. The market will catch up to the technology.
The Case for Brave Policy
Lee is quick to acknowledge that regulation matters. But she wants to reframe how we talk about it.
“We should talk more about the moments when regulators and utilities are brave and take a risk on new technology,” she says. “The failures get too much attention while the successes don’t get recognized enough.”
The parallel she draws is to ride-sharing and autonomous vehicles: technologies that need careful regulation for safety and reliability but also offer immense potential value. The question is whether we can hold both truths at once—managing risk while making room for innovation.
What the Grid of the Future Looks Like
Today, the grid relies on passive electromechanical devices, such as transformers and switchgear, that have changed little over the past few decades. But advances in wide-bandgap semiconductors and silicon carbide transistors are opening new possibilities. The key enabler, in her view, is power electronics.
“I’m very excited about the future of power electronics for the grid,” Lee says, “and how much more control and flexibility we’ll have going forward.”
The question is how quickly this technology gets deployed, and whether the infrastructure investments being made today leave room for it.
The Financing Imperative
When Lee joined Redaptive’s board in 2021, she had been skeptical of energy efficiency for years.
“I’d actually been pretty wary of getting involved in energy efficiency for a long time,” she admits. “Just because it’s low-hanging fruit, but it’s so complex. It’s so hard to deploy.”
Some projects make sense on paper. LED lighting, for instance, often delivers compelling ROI on its own. But HVAC upgrades, building controls, and other efficiency measures are harder to justify when evaluated in isolation. And even when the numbers work, execution projects can stall due to these complexities:
- Coordinating contractors across dozens or hundreds of sites
- Navigating utility incentive programs that vary by jurisdiction
- Managing the risk that savings won’t materialize as projected
These complexities are exactly what organizations face when they try to modernize infrastructure on their own. Understanding the true cost of energy retrofits requires looking beyond equipment prices to the full burden of execution.
“I really liked Redaptive’s approach,” Lee says. “It was really built to scale, bringing the financing piece to it and really solving customers’ commercial and industrial needs.”
For finance leaders: Redaptive’s CFO Playbook explores how industrial enterprises can modernize aging infrastructure while preserving liquidity—the financial architecture behind “built to scale.”
Where Optimism Lives
Despite the challenges in today’s energy landscape, Lee is optimistic. Technology costs keep dropping. And critically, better data is building investor confidence.
“The better data that we can collect, and the investor community being comfortable with that technology, leads to more financing available and more deployment and scale,” she says.
It’s a virtuous cycle: performance data builds confidence, confidence unlocks capital, capital enables deployment, and deployment generates more data. AI-enabled smart metering is already giving organizations granular visibility into energy consumption patterns, turning infrastructure from a black box into a data asset.
“I’m an engineer by training,” Lee says, explaining that “the belief that we can continue to innovate on the technology side and create better products for customers” makes her optimistic for the future.
The Long Game
Organizations making infrastructure decisions today have a window. Load growth is creating demand. Technology costs are falling. Financing models exist that didn’t a decade ago.
“With all that load growth, it does create the opportunity to make the right investment decisions,” Lee says.
The question is whether we use this moment to build flexibility into the system—or lock in commitments we’ll be living with for the next 40 years.
This post is based on a conversation from the Redaptive Blueprints Podcast. Listen to the full podcast here.
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