If you've attended an industry conference lately, you've probably noticed there's one topic that keeps coming up: electrification.
For utilities, the reasons are clear. Growing electricity demand, evolving customer expectations, increasing interest in grid flexibility, and the need to balance affordability with reliability are reshaping program design. At the same time, homeowners are looking for technologies that improve comfort, resilience, and long-term efficiency while lowering energy costs.
One thing is clear: delivering successful energy programs is about more than selecting the right technologies. It's about making those technologies practical and cost-effective to deploy—which brings me to a topic that doesn't generate nearly as many conference keynotes: procurement.
It may not be the flashiest part of program design, but after years working with contractors and supply chains, I've learned that many contractor-installed programs don't actually have a procurement strategy.
Utilities establish eligible measures, equipment specifications, and incentive levels, while contractors purchase qualifying equipment from the suppliers they choose. That flexibility fragments purchasing across dozens or even hundreds of buyers, limiting pricing consistency, visibility, and collective buying power.
Procurement is often treated as an administrative function, but it should be viewed as a program strategy.
Trade Ally Supply brings procurement into program design without disrupting existing contractor relationships. By aggregating purchasing volume across participating contractors, it creates greater buying power, more consistent pricing, and earlier visibility into purchasing activity, while continuing to leverage local distributors whenever practical.
The result is a solution that helps utilities reduce measure costs, improve pricing equity across contractors, strengthen program oversight, and support local supply networks instead of replacing them.
For many utilities, the challenge isn't simply controlling costs; it's understanding them.
In traditional contractor-installed programs, product-level purchasing information often isn't available until installation data and incentive applications have been submitted and processed. By then, the information may be weeks or even months old. Earlier access to purchasing data changes the conversation.
Instead of looking backward, program teams can monitor purchasing activity as it happens, identify demand trends, improve forecasting, strengthen program governance, and better understand budget. Purchasing data becomes a decision-making tool, helping administrators manage programs while they're still in motion.
The opportunity becomes even more compelling in direct install and income-qualified programs.
In many of these programs, utilities are already funding equipment purchases through fixed contractor compensation. Trade Ally Supply doesn't change that model—it strengthens it by introducing a centralized procurement strategy that can lower equipment costs through aggregated purchasing, improve pricing consistency across contractors, provide earlier insight into purchasing activity, and strengthen forecasting, reporting, and overall program oversight.
In other words, if program dollars are already paying for equipment, procurement should work just as hard as every other part of the program.
Want to explore the concept further? Download our Trade Ally Supply Playbook to learn how program-aligned procurement can improve cost effectiveness, strengthen pricing equity, and provide greater visibility into contractor-installed measures.
As electrification programs continue to evolve, success will depend on more than customer adoption. It will also depend on delivering technologies like air source heat pumps and heat pump water heaters in ways that are cost-effective, scalable, and easier for contractors to implement.
That's exactly what I'll be discussing during Franklin Energy's upcoming webinar, From Readiness to Reality: Designing Electrification Programs That Perform.
Together, we'll explore research-backed strategies for increasing customer participation, practical approaches for delivering electrification measures more cost-effectively, and how utilities can transform procurement from a fragmented contractor activity into a strategic component of program design. We'll also examine how Trade Ally Supply helps programs aggregate buying power, gain earlier visibility into performance, and strengthen contractor engagement through localized supply networks.
If you're designing, managing, or evolving electrification programs, I hope you'll join us.