The great divergence: Can the grid catch up to transportation innovation? [partner content]

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Jul 29, 2025

Devrim Celal, Chief Flexibility and Marketing Officer at Kraken, dives into the intriguing divergence between transportation and electricity systems. He highlights how transportation has embraced real-time innovation, while electricity lags behind. Celal discusses the potential for consumer engagement to revolutionize the grid, enabling personalized electric vehicle charging tariffs and improved utility customer experiences. With the advent of AI and unified data systems, he envisions a future where the electricity sector catches up to transportation's dynamic capabilities.

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INSIGHT

Diverging Paths of Systems

Transportation and electricity systems started similarly with central hubs and networks in the 1800s.
Transportation evolved with real-time data and dynamic pricing, while electricity stayed centralized and less consumer-focused.

ANECDOTE

Wind Turbines and Consumer Engagement

Octopus Energy Group showed that consumers accept local wind turbines if they receive benefits.
They engaged 35,000 people on an island, publishing forecasts to help schedule electricity use for discounts.

ANECDOTE

Behavioral Demand Response Success

During the UK energy crisis, 1.5 million customers reduced electricity use at peak times.
They saved money and shifted demand from carbon-intensive periods, showing willingness to help the grid.

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Why can your phone instantly reroute you around traffic, but your utility can't tell you when to charge your car for maximum savings? Why can Uber optimize thousands of drivers in real-time, while the electrical grid struggles to optimize distributed resources?

Both transportation and electricity systems emerged during the Victorian era with remarkably similar infrastructure: central hubs connected by sprawling networks. Train stations and power plants. Main lines and transmission lines. Local roads and distribution networks.

But over the next century and a half, these parallel systems took radically different paths.

Transportation embraced real-time telemetry, dynamic pricing, and consumer-centric innovation. But electricity remained fundamentally unchanged — still moving electrons through the same basic infrastructure with minimal visibility into what's happening at the distribution level.

Devrim Celal, chief flexibility and marketing officer at Kraken, has been studying this divergence. And he believes we're finally at a point where electricity systems can catch up.

"We've just left the Victorian era and we've got a long way to go," says Celal. "But we're seeing incredible results that consumers are willing to participate."

In this episode, produced in partnership with Kraken, Stephen Lacey talks with Devrim about why utilities are finally ready to embrace the same consumer-centric innovation that transformed transportation decades ago.

The conversation reveals how historical innovation patterns in transportation offer a roadmap for electricity's next phase — and why the convergence of these systems through electric vehicles might finally force the grid into the modern era.

This is a partner episode, brought to you by Kraken.

Kraken removes the outdated, siloed tech that's holding back most utilities. Their unified operating system streamlines and enhances operations, meaning happier teams and happier customers for a fraction of the cost. Join leading utilities across the globe and redefine the sector with Kraken. Go to kraken.tech to learn more.