Emerging Opportunities

Innovative Solutions, Tested Outcomes, Scaled Impact.

ILLUME’s Emerging Opportunities Practice Area helps clients pursue energy solutions by identifying, evaluating, and scaling emerging technologies and innovations. Our Emerging Opportunities services span various client initiatives, including energy efficiency, demand response, grid modernization, decarbonization, and distributed energy resources. Our multidisciplinary team provides end-to-end support, integrating technical expertise with human-centered approaches to ensure our solutions address reliability, affordability, workforce development, and supply chain considerations.

Our Services

Emerging Technology Strategy and Design

We support you in shaping and implementing R&D and emerging technology strategies that align with your policy mandates, including energy efficiency targets, electrification, reliability, and energy affordability. From refining processes to setting measurable goals, we create actionable roadmaps and success frameworks to help you turn your visions into impactful interventions with clear returns on investments.

Applied Engineering and Building Science Research

We deliver in-depth research on emerging technologies and market dynamics to support your strategic decision-making. Our services include market analyses, barrier and catalyst identification, supply chain evaluations, and technology research. We help you estimate market potential and understand whether your investments can achieve success at scale. 

Pilot Evaluation, Design, and Strategy

We support you by evaluating, designing, and conducting independent assessments of emerging technologies. This includes delivering insights on what factors drive your impacts, participant experience and usability, and market potential. Our experts ensure you have accurate and defensible evaluations that are conscious of the end user and reflective of market conditions and trends, even for technologies lacking standardized guidelines.

Technical Assistance

We provide comprehensive and embedded technical support to your team. We do this across a wide range of efforts, such as pilot design, proof of concept studies, and rigorous data testing. Our technical support spans TRMs, ASTM standards, ENERGY STAR® submissions, evaluation methods, and other technical protocols and helps to ensure you can seamlessly execute your initiatives with confidence in your results. 

Sharing Their Knowledge

Meet Our Experts

  • Marilla Yaggie

    Director

    Marilla brings more than ten years of experience as a data scientist and engineer in the energy sector. In her role, Marilla deftly leads teams through emerging technology portfolio development and evaluation to support the next generation of energy programs, technologies, and services.

  • Pace Goodman

    Senior Director

    Pace brings more than fifteen years of experience in the energy utility sector using data science, engineering, and applied mathematics to facilitate and strengthen demand-side management, distributed generation, and rates programs.