Matter Energy Management

Hello everyone, and welcome. Thank you for joining us today for the Silicon Labs Tech Talk on Matter Smart Energy. My name is Jeremy Stacy, and I'm the product marketing manager at Silicon Labs. 
  
I'll be moderating today's session and helping guide both the discussion and Q&A. Today, I'm joined by Sami Kaislasuo and Mark Beecham from the Silicon Labs industrial team. Sami is a staff product marketing manager focused on emerging energy applications such as EV charging, solar, and energy storage. 
  
He leads Silicon Lab's efforts around Matter for energy management. Mark is a senior marketing manager specializing in metering and grid infrastructure, working closely with utility and grid partners around the world. Together, they bring over 20 years of experience across engineering, product management, marketing, and business leadership. 
  
They offer a well-rounded perspective on the future of energy, connectivity, and the role of Matter in unifying it all. Today's session, we will begin with an overview of the energy landscape, where we are today, where things are heading, and the challenges along the way. From there, we'll look at how to bridge the gap, the grid edge gap. 
  
What it is, why it matters, and how can it be addressed. Finally, we'll explore how Matter for Energy enables a more unified energy management, including the key benefits, the new capabilities in Matter 1.5, and the real-world use cases. My name is Mark. 
  
I'm more on the grid, utility infrastructure side, so I want to go over how the landscape is and some of the challenges we're facing. And then my colleague, Sami, will come afterwards and talk about how the ecosystem can develop to help solve these challenges. So if you look at the energy landscape today, we're in this electrification age, and then step two was the digitization of that electrification. 
  
All of the older style things, think about the power tool space and the lawn equipment, all that's going electricity, and that's a big trend that's happening. The utility company's mentality is typically on the conservative side, very risk-averse, and for the past 20 years, that has worked well. They've developed a grid and have been supplying power quite nicely. 
  
But as things are changing, as electrification is happening with EVs, with data centers, climate, things like that, renewables, the demand profile is changing more rapidly than the mindset of the utilities. So we have this problem that we're facing that the utilities are looking at. So let's take a look at exactly why this is happening. 
  
So everyone likes to blame the data centers as like, "Hey, that's the thing that's causing all the stress on the grid," but it's really a multitude of things, and we'll also look at some data in a couple slides to look at exactly the percentages. So you have the big data center rollouts that are coming up with the AI/ML race. You have EVs. 
  
There's a lot of government incentives and even regulations to really push EVs. A lot more homes are getting chargers. That's a massive increase in load on the grid, and we have the electrification of everything. 
  
I mentioned lawn tools as an example there. You also have a growing middle class around the globe, and typically, a growing middle class wants the luxuries that consume more electricity. You also have climate change, but not necessarily climate change. 
  
It's more extreme weather events. You have longer heat waves. You can have longer cloudy days like on the West Coast that relies on solar, and that can be a big problem. 
  
So what is all these accelerating consumers causing? So if you look at the graph on the right, pretty much every utility is looking at some form of this graph. They have their capacity that they're modeling out. 
  
As new plants come online or new solar farms come online, and then they have a projection of demand over the next five, 10, 20 years. There's an upper and lower projection, but pretty much every utility has some point in time where those lines are going to cross, where the peak demand is going to outweigh the capacity. Some utilities are already facing this today, and they are having to buy power from neighboring utilities, and other utilities are a year from this. 
  
Some are three, some are five, but they're all looking at this graph. So some of the other things that are hitting the utilities and causing this is a lot of the older, dirtier carbon sources are getting regulated down or going offline. And yes, while it's being replaced by renewables, the pace is not as high as they would like it to be. 
  
There's also a slight nuclear push, but the nuclear plants take years to make and are very expensive. And then the third thing that's happening to the utilities is they rolled out all this infrastructure and the transformers and the lines and the distribution centers to last 15 to 20 years out there. But with this increase in demand, that's no longer the case. 
  
So now they're facing with an infrastructure problem that's also expensive. So just getting hit with a lot of problems. Let's look at some other things that are causing the landscape to change and some of these challenges. 
  
There's a big trend right now into this kind of de-globalization. Countries want to be more self-reliant. They want to bring manufacturing and industry back into their shores and then their control. 
  
And so that's pushing a lot more factories and industry distributed around each country, and the grid is increasing its consumption in that regard. I mentioned EVs before, but that's a big part of it, too, especially if the commercial industry starts to go EVs with big truck batteries, and then you have charging stations for those. You have to plan out where you can send that much power to those charging stations. 
  
I mentioned the data centers. Some utilities are actually getting contracted right now to build power plants specifically for data centers. So you have municipalities or townships. 
  
They want the data center business. They want the commerce that it brings, and so they're trying to get the utility to build power specifically for those data centers. And one, I'll call the dark horse of this, is comfort or cooling, whichever you want to call it. So if you look at some of the new technologies like heat pumps, mini splits and things like that, right? 
  
The cost of these things are coming down. We have a growing middle class that is leading to more and more heat pumps, more and more mini splits, as it becomes in the realm of affordability for more people. This on top of big extreme weather events like a heat wave that could sit over a state for a very long time. 
  
It really could increase demand sporadically. So let's look at some data from one of the reports that we have. The crux of the problem is in the last 20 years, demand has grown linearly and pretty stable in the low single-digit percentage points per year. 
  
So the utilities could plan for it like clockwork. Now the demand is increasing faster than they expected, and it's dynamic. And so if you look at some of the segments that are driving these utility challenges, I mentioned that kind of de-globalization, that's industry, is really having a really strong growth. 
  
It is regionally dependent on which countries are more hungry to bring industry back into their shores or not. The second one is transport. Obviously, mostly EV chargers. 
  
Like I said, if enough homes get those, that number can really crank upwards. AC and cooling 10%, and then surprisingly, data centers only at 8%. Data centers is obviously very dynamic right now with the investment and whether it can accelerate, it can slow down. 
  
So that number is conservative, I would say. You also have just other emerging economies. Like I said, when you have a growing middle class, the expectation of luxury, that typically means more consumption of electricity happens, so you have to plan for that. 
  
That's more in the Asia, Southeast Asia kind of areas. But this is just one glimpse at the breakdown of what's causing this increase in energy consumption around the world. And that pretty much every utility is looking at it, whether it's a government-owned or investor-owned utility, trying to figure out how do we change the mindset and adapt to this more dynamic market. 
  
So speaking of dynamic. So the regeneration sources like hydro, solar, wind, they're great, but they are not like a typical coal or gas plant, right? They are dynamic. 
  
You have windy days, you have sunny days, you have cloudy days. So they can all come with their challenges. So if you look at hydro, right, this is typically a very stable source. 
  
It's probably the most stable of the three renewables on here. But there's a really high amount of regulations to increase your capacity. And if you have extreme drought, sometimes the reservoirs can go down. 
  
So that can be a challenge if you say, "Hey, I need to build another dam." There's years of environmental studies that need to happen in order to do that, and sometimes you just can't. So we see some utilities come up with that problem. Solar is great as well. 
  
Again, on the West Coast, though, if you're heavily reliant on it, you get a cloudy two weeks, you could have problems there. Also, with solar and wind, it's very distributed, right? It's not like a plant where it's centrally located. 
  
You can just build it near the city center, send the power where it needs to go, and you're done. Solar and wind are very expansive. You have to route the power to where it needs to go. 
  
I mentioned nuclear before, pros and cons for sure on that one. There's a lot of regulations, and it's just really expensive and takes a really long time to build that one. So not only is your demand profile kind of increasing and changing, your generation sources are also dynamic and changing. 
  
So you now have two variables, right? You have two dice, and there are going to be days or instances where you roll the dice, and they both land on the bad side. And then the utilities, unfortunately, have to use tools like rolling brownouts and things like that. 
  
So it needs to be more aware of what it's going. You need to have more data to monitor what's going on in the grid to figure out what your generation profile is, and then predict what your demand profile is, and try to make those match and never have a situation where your peak demand line goes above the capacity that you're able to output. So what does that kind of profile look like? 
  
There's a common term in the industry called the duck curve. You see the shape there where everybody wakes up in the morning, turns their kettle on, some power generation there. Everybody goes to work, so the demand goes down. 
  
However, that's when your solar and wind are generating the most. So it's the opposite problem you want to have. And then everyone gets home, plugs in their EV chargers, turns on their oven for dinner, all that stuff, and you get this big evening ramp. 
  
So the big thing that utilities and the operators are trying to do is figure out, mainly in that evening ramp, that peak demand, how do we flatten that curve? The most common way we're seeing solve this is, hey, when you're in that flat belly, store some of that energy distributed around your grid, and then use that when you need it in the evening. That seems to be the first band-aid on this problem. 
  
But depending on how much demand continues to increase, do you just keep increasing your energy storage around your grid, right? You spend more. It's not a perfect solution there. 
  
You also need to predict what that evening curve's going to look like. What's the temperature? What's my solar generating? 
  
How windy is it? And then you can say, "Okay, how much power do I need to store so you can have just the right amount when you need it?" So this is a common industry problem. If you talk to any utility and mention duck curve, belly, they'll all know exactly what you're talking about because they're all looking at this. 
  
So, how can you deal with this curve because this is just the human nature of this curve, and how can you design your grid or your systems to help prevent any sort of brownouts that have to happen in that evening ramp? So let's look at an example, right? So I mentioned aging infrastructure before, so I wanted to call out something specific on this. 
  
I would say this was the first glimpse of the problem at the utilities. So you have a transformer that you deploy and needs to survive typically 20 to 25 years out there. It can do 20 to 50 kilowatts, depending what it is. 
  
The problem is, say you have a transformer feeding four houses. That transformer can support two of those houses getting an EV charger, but it can't support more than that. But the utility can't control whether or not these homeowners install EV chargers or not. So you have this problem where the grid needs to know, "Hey, that third house got an EV charger." If everybody plugs it in at 6:00 PM when they get home and they go to the full power, it's going to blow the transformer. 
  
So this was the first forcing function that the utilities say, "We have a problem." But there's ways that you can look at it. There's also a lot more houses out there that are having battery backups. There's also a lot more houses with solar. 
  
So the utilities are trying to say, "Hey, how can we use those distributed resources and solve this gap or plug in this transformer gap right now?" The utilities are saying it takes about two to three years once you put in a work order to go replace that transformer. There's a lot of studies and regulations and paperwork that needs to go to replace that. So they have a real immediate problem with this, kind of a micro version of the duck curve, right? 
  
Everyone gets home, plugs it all in, and your weakest link right now is the transformer closest to the houses. So you need to be more aware of what's going on, which transformers are the problem, which ones do I need to replace first. So that's the problem that these guys are looking at and how they're looking to solve it. 
  
Let's get into that a little bit. So we call it the edge gap, right? The utilities can see everything up until the meter, right? 
  
That's their ecosystem, that's their network. Anything behind the meter is typically what we call it. The utilities, they would love insight, and they would love control of that, but they don't have it right now. 
  
So the utilities are trying to solve this problem, but they're working with an incomplete data set because all they can see is what the grid is capable of. Like, "Hey, I know I can generate this much power." Okay, but what's going to be the peak demand this evening? They don't know because that's dynamic. 
  
And so there needs to be some sort of bridge or some sort of way that the utility can connect the, "What am I capable of generating and what can I control?" Versus, "What is the user going to be turning on?" And then, can we talk to each other so we can align that? So that's typically where the utility story in my business ends. So I will hand it over to Sami to take it from here on the ecosystem within the home and bridging that gap. 
  
All right. Thanks, Mark. So if I continue from here, so the real gap isn't necessarily always the power gap. 
  
It's also an information and a control gap. There are already existing ways to connect pieces of the system, and some of them work really well already. But many of them are custom-made, brand-specific, cloud-specific, utility-specific, and it really makes it harder to scale. 
  
So we need an ecosystem and a common way for devices to describe the energy data, tariffs, and control actions. It doesn't replace every other technology, but instead, it helps different parts of the ecosystem speak the same language so that utilities, platforms, and devices can work together with less integration effort. So in summary, you could think of it that home is becoming an active part of the energy system, not just a consumer, but participating also in the energy management, if you will. 
  
But the digital links are still too fragmented to make it happen. So let me... Next slide. 
  
So some of the examples, to put things into perspective, here are some real-world examples of grid edge programs that do exist around the world. We already see demand response, time of use pricing, solar and battery coordination, depending where you are in the world and how acute the need is. So the value is not theoretical. 
  
It's already proven and out there. The issue is that many of these examples were built as one-off. So either the utility is building it or the battery storage company is building that solution. 
  
But it's one-off integration. One utility works with one device brand, one platform supports one program in the region, and so on. That can still deliver benefits, but it doesn't scale easily across the full market. 
  
If the same type of pricing signal, device capabilities, or load control can be expressed in a standard way, then the whole ecosystem moves faster. That would mean faster deployment, less custom engineering, more device choice, and better chance for utilities to reach more homes without rebuilding integrations every time. You're already seeing also regulation come into play. 
  
This is an example from what's happening in the EU, the Energy-Smart Appliances Code of Conduct. The regulation and industry guidance are moving into the same direction. The market is asking for appliances to react to energy conditions in a smarter way, and the regulators are also seeing the possibilities. 
  
For device makers, it's important because the energy flexibility is no longer just a nice feature. It's becoming part of the expected story, and the consumers will expect it, especially if there's a regulation mandating. Appliances should be able to delay, reduce, or optimize usage when there is clear cost or grid benefit. 
  
This would also support the case of a unified ecosystem when different countries' ecosystems and product categories all need energy-aware behavior, a standard becomes more valuable. It lowers the amount of customer needed for each appliance and each ecosystem or region. And the ecosystem approach reduces the risk that every region would ask slightly different implementation, and every product team would need to rebuild the same feature many times again and again. 
  
So there's a lot of opportunity here. Holistically manage the energy better for the utilities and grid operators to add more customer value from the end users, and giving more flexibility how to grow the capacity in a sustainable way. Utilities and the ecosystem players do not want to solve just one problem. 
  
They want to look at this holistically. They want to optimize demand, make better use of renewables and distributed resources to create new services that will eventually pay or value. At the same time, they want to delay expensive infrastructure upgrades when needed or possible. 
  
That's especially important in energy, where margins can be tight. The integration cost can be easily slow in adaptation. It is clear that the ecosystem is the best way to achieve these goals, but what is the most suitable ecosystem to tackle these with enough global footprint and device coverage? 
  
And that's where Matter comes into play. So up until this point, we've shown the pressure on the grid and how flexible, or the growth of flexible loads in home and the limitations of those closed integrations. Now the question becomes: what is the common framework that can connect all of these pieces in a practical way? 
  
Our message is that Matter can become that framework for the consumer and building the side of the ecosystem. It gives a common model for devices, control, and energy information. That means that developers do not need to start from zero for every ecosystem connection. 
  
Matter is not only a technology and the system, it does not . Utilities will still use meter networks, cloud services, and other protocols as they see fit. The value of Matter is that it adds a common ecosystem layer closer to the devices and the user experience. 
  
That's why we see that Matter is important and has a play here. So what is Matter in energy? It is a unifying layer for energy management and of course, other home automation, as you might know. 
  
You can see different functions here. It can report data, do demand response, load control, tariff information, and support supplying energy back into the home. You can also see different ecosystems that has a connection options to it, like Apple, SmartThings, and so forth, who are very involved in Matter. 
  
So Matter helps device types and brands participate in one shared energy model instead of every ecosystem inventing separate ways to represent this, whether it's tariffs, demand response, or load control. Matter brings that unified and a common approach. It creates benefits across the makers participating in that ecosystem. 
  
For users, it can mean simpler experience, more freedom to choose the devices, instead of just something the utility mandate, but you'll have a pool of devices if they support the same technology. For device makers, it means less duplicated development. For utilities and service providers, it means better chances to scale their programs across more homes and more brands as they don't need to select just one, but can support multiple devices. 
  
And importantly, Matter can work alongside any existing solution, basically. If a company already has a cloud service or other networking technologies, Matter can still add value by making device-level interoperability and ecosystem much easier, or added services on top of what you already have. So in simple terms, Matter can become the common layer between grid needs, device behavior, and user-facing ecosystem. 
  
So what are the benefits for Matter in energy management? Or kind of looking at practical use cases. So people want to lower their bills and have more smarter automation, but do not want to lose comfort and control of their home. 
  
Matter would support that by giving devices a standard way of responding tariff messages or demands response events from the grid or the utility player and add your local preference to it. So that's kind of from a user point of view. Secondly, the value is for the grid and energy providers. 
  
Better coordination mean better stability as we learn. Loads can shift away from peak times. More renewable energy can be used when it's available because the data and control model is shared. In scaling, those actions become easier with Matter. 
  
Thirdly, there is a value for compliance and future readiness. More regions are asking for energy-aware systems. Matter helps those companies prepare once and reuse that across the ecosystem. 
  
So the main benefit of Matter is not to be the only possible solution. The main benefit is that it lowers friction. It gives the ecosystem common base for energy features, which help everyone move faster, do less custom integration work. 
  
Usually, a lower friction ecosystem means faster rollout and broader participation, and in this case, we mean broader participation to the energy management and evolving energy scene. So some more concrete examples. For EV, what would this mean? 
  
So with Matter, you can help move charging to cheaper or cleaner times, reduce charging during grid stress, or align charging with your local solar production from your rooftop solar. For water heaters, it can shift heating to an off-peak period or moments when renewable energy is strong. For appliances, it can delay start times, reduce power for a period of time, or respond automatically to a utility or market signal, so like a demand response. 
  
Now, none of these ideas are new by themselves. Solutions do exist, but what is new and important is doing them in a more interoperable way. So, the case of EV, if you want to do fuse protection or circuit breaker protection, nowadays, you need to create your own device, which is closer to the fuse, and then these two devices discuss with each other and communicate. 
  
But with Matter, EVSE makers can focus on creating the chargers, whereas a smart circuit breaker or other energy monitoring device can give the signals to change your charging behavior. So Matter offers that standard way of expressing schedules, preferences, and control, making it easier for platforms and devices to coordinate. It also makes it easier for users to understand what is happening across products in one's home, if you think about that you have a Matter-enabled home automation. 
  
So a new Matter spec with more energy enablement came out end of last year. So Matter 1.5, it starts to be the basis and the building block for turning the energy vision into concrete building blocks from a standardization point of view. So the 1.5 introduced new device type for energy, and the device types were utility meter that can represent a billing point in the system. 
  
Then an electrical meter can represent a sub-meter for a circuit or an appliance. A meter reference point helps describe where a meter sits in the site topology, so within your home. So it can describe better the topology of your home energy. 
  
And then the tariff object helps present the pricing structure that the device may respond to. So the device types don't do anything without the clusters, and you could think about the devices as nouns and the clusters as more like a verb or an attribute of the system. So the clusters define what energy information can be shared and how devices can act on it. 
  
Like on a pricing side, Matter can represent tariff structures, either live or forecast pricing information and grid conditions such as the carbon signals. So how much carbon is generated doing a kilowatt hour at that time. On a measurement side, it can standardize a meter identity and energy counters. 
  
On an optimization side, it can express user intent, like whether the user wants to prioritize cost, comfort, or carbon. So carbon emissions in this case. This is important because energy management only works well when devices understand both the signal and the user intent. 
  
A dishwasher should not just know that the power is expensive right now, it should also know whether the user wants the lowest cost, the lowest carbon impact, or the fastest completion. So again, the value of Matter is ecosystem consistency. It helps different products to react to energy information and predict in a user-friendly way. 
  
So this slide is a proof point that the ecosystem support is starting to appear. We already see major platforms and smart home players moving towards energy management experience. Apple, Samsung, LG, and others are showing their piece into this direction. 
  
The standards become powerful when ecosystem implement them, not only when they are written down. So once a platform support grows, device makers can have a clearer reason to invest, and users get more visible value in real products and apps. It's still early and not all the energy management examples use Matter, but we're definitely seeing an increase in these enablements. 
  
The different ecosystems are moving at different speeds, but the direction is clear. Energy is becoming a first-class smart home feature rather than an afterthought. This is why Matter is important. 
  
It can give this ecosystem a shared foundation, so energy features can spread faster across brands and categories instead of staying locked inside a small number of customer solutions or walled gardens. So, if I were to close and summarize the benefits in three levels. So for users, Matter can be the enablement to bring services that reduce bills, improve visibility to your home energy usage, and make energy automation feel simpler. 
  
Instead of managing multiple apps and several rules for each product, users can move towards for a more unified experience, maybe one app and one ecosystem, instead of having each device with their own app. For utilities, on the other hand, and energy service providers, Matter helps create better visibility and better load flexibility. That supports demand response, new tariff, improved grid operation, and smarter investment decisions. 
  
So it gives that flexibility that utilities and grid providers are searching for. Then the third, the device makers. So Matter can reduce effectively the duplicated effort and the market reach. 
  
So think about creating your product and modifying to multiple walled gardens or smaller markets one by one. It's expensive, but with Matter, you can build once, support more ecosystems with just one implementation, and participate in a growing energy value chain with just one implementation. So this is the ecosystem story. 
  
More alignment, less fragmentation, and a better path for grid signals and to devices to enable a more actionable user value.