Matt Golden’s Vision for a Smarter, Decarbonized Energy Future
“You have to use energy to save it.” - Matt Golden’s Vision for a Smarter, Decarbonized Energy Future
In the world of distributed energy resources (DERs), where buzzwords abound, and promises often outpace reality, Matt Golden plays the role of both insider and outsider. A champion of data-backed, pay-for-performance energy efficiency, Golden sees past the usual limitations and into the systemic issues driving the industry’s inefficiencies. His insights are hard-won, ”I started my career in energy efficiency and distributed energy really at the ground level, on the construction side of things,” he recalls. His early work as a retrofit contractor laid the foundation for his understanding of the industry’s tangled inefficiencies.
Working in programs that paid for models or average deemed savings meant that as a contractor, investing in high-quality work reduced margins and resulted in a race to the bottom, where contractors who did the least could make the most. These early programs, such as Energy Upgrade California, had significant challenges. The Energy Upgrade California program created huge new transaction costs and incentivized contractors to dramatically overestimate savings by paying for predicted outcomes. The program design is exactly like the IRA Home Energy programs about to roll out nationwide, paid for predicted savings from an energy model, not actual results. Ultimately, the California program did not scale as contractors were overwhelmed by complex rules, delivering only 29% of predicted savings.
Golden’s initial path was laden with frustration, “You get what you pay for,” he states, cutting right to the heart of the problem, “and you have to use energy before you can save it.” This simple truth has pushed him toward a vision of energy efficiency that aligns financial incentives with real-world impact, creating a shift from hypothetical savings to measurable, reliable reductions in energy use. His work at Recurve was a significant turning point, enabling him to advocate for a pay-for-performance model that rewards measurable outcomes over the volume of installations. “What if, instead of paying me to cut costs, you paid me to deliver what you want?” he reflects–a question that has driven his career ever since.
A System Built to Fail
Golden’s ideas didn’t come from the halls of academia or corporate boardrooms but from the hot, noisy crawlspaces where he spent his early career as a contractor. His work was challenging, but not for the reasons one might expect. Instead of fighting the limits of technology, he was battling the industry’s pervasive lack of accountability.
“My incentive was to cut all my costs because every penny I spent to do quality work that meaningfully delivered results was a penny I’d never get back,” Golden reflects. “The world we’ve lived in, which is product-based rebates, creates this crazy incentive structure.” In this world, contractors are paid based on installations, not on whether the installations save energy. “If I was paid for a heat pump, my best way to increase my margins was to buy a cheap one or to install it in the cheapest way possible, not necessarily the most effective.”
Golden explains this with the frustration of someone immersed in a system designed to reward cost-cutting over effectiveness, leaving customers with little insight into whether their investments paid off. “The market has no reason to do a good job; the customer’s the only one that benefits, and they have no idea if the work even [was effective] in the first place,” he explains.
Here, in Golden’s early experiences, lies the seed of his mission to change how the energy sector incentivizes efficiency. He was confronted not just with the challenge of reducing energy consumption but with a financial model that was actively undermining it. “The economics just aren’t that strong for most of these things—just purely on customer bill savings,” he says.
“Everybody talks about energy efficiency and demand response being a resource,” Golden continues, “But is that true? Are these things behaving like a resource? And I think that, largely, they weren’t.” This reality has spurred both his career and purpose, “Everything I’ve done since has been about how we attract the trillions of dollars needed to scale distributed energy resources and deliver resources that make a real impact on decarbonization. Personally, that’s why I’m in this business–I know that it can have a meaningful impact.”
Reimagining Value: Pay-for-Performance
Golden’s response to the traditional rebate model was radical, if not practical: What if we stopped paying contractors to install things and started paying them to deliver results? In Golden’s mind, this shift–from theoretical savings to real, measured reductions in energy use–could transform energy efficiency into something more dependable—almost as reliable as the power plants themselves.
“Some of the formative ideas around pay-for-performance,” he says, come from that simple shift. “Instead of paying me to cut costs through rebates and then trying to regulate me with a 300-page rule book and spending half the money on people to look over my shoulder, what if you paid me to deliver what you want?” It was a strikingly logical proposition that upended decades of conventional wisdom in energy efficiency.
In a pay-for-performance world, efficiency projects would be judged not by what they installed but by how much energy they saved. This system would simplify the web of regulations and red tape plaguing the industry–those “300-page rulebooks,” as Golden referred. “Rather than trying to regulate the snot out of contractors, pay them for meaningful work,” he argues. Data would be king in this world, and the financial rewards would flow to those who could deliver measurable outcomes, not just promises.
Smart Meters: Data as the New Currency
Of course, measuring impact requires a reliable way to track energy use. That’s where smart meters come in. These devices provide real-time insights into energy consumption, creating a wealth of data that can be used to measure the effects of energy efficiency projects. “The most important data is the smart meter data because it’s the cusp between the utility and everything behind the meter,” Golden says. “This data is where you can measure from because you have precondition data, baseline data…you can segment [performance data] to drive the outcomes you want.”
Smart meters allow contractors and utilities alike to establish baselines, track changes, and verify the impact of upgrades. For Golden, it’s about much more than just tracking numbers. “There’s a tremendous amount of information in smart meter data, and that’s where you can measure from because you have precondition data, baseline data,” he explains. This data enables a shift from guesswork to precision, making it possible to approach energy efficiency with the same rigor as any other form of power generation. With smart meters, Golden believes energy efficiency can finally live up to its potential as a reliable, investable resource.
Standardization: The Path from ‘Snowflakes’ to Portfolios
The challenge with DERs is their diversity. Unlike traditional power plants, which are uniform by design, DERs are fragmented and idiosyncratic. From thermostats to batteries, DERs lack the standardization that investors typically crave. For Golden, this is a problem worth solving.
“The whole goal is how do we take these bespoke snowflake assets—this thermostat from this company and these 10,000 from another one—and put in place systems that allow for homogenization, essentially aggregation,” he explains. It’s a problem that many industries have faced before. Golden likens it to agriculture: “There was a time in the US when every state had a different bushel of corn. It’s the same with energy. Can’t we all agree on a consistent measure that isn’t a black scary box but is open-source, with clear, open, and tested methods?”
Golden envisions a world where DERs are packaged into standardized portfolios, ready for large-scale investment. “There’s an absolute ton of money on the sidelines looking for deals they can invest in. Having a portfolio of buildings they can invest in is the hard part,” he says.
Financing the Future: Scaling Virtual Power Plants
If DERs can be standardized, they can be bundled into virtual power plants (VPPs), networks of small, decentralized resources that together act as a single entity on the grid. For Golden, VPPs offer a way to turn DERs into a scalable, dependable resource that can replace traditional power plants. “I’m confident that virtual power plants can scale and deliver consistent results that can be financed,” he asserts, describing a future where VPPs offer grid flexibility and stability without the need for massive centralized plants.
“If you’re going to securitize the value stream that comes from energy flexibility, if you look at the core building blocks, you need an asset class,” he says, “You need to know what a project is in a way you can categorize, and you need consistent ways to measure stuff and third-party due diligence.” Only then, Golden believes, will DERs find their rightful place in the grid.
The path isn’t easy. DERs face skepticism, especially from those accustomed to the straightforward reliability of large power plants. Golden acknowledges this, noting that DERs, with their fragmented, distributed nature, “give a lot of folks who are used to big centralized resources heartburn.” However, he argues that their distributed nature makes them more resilient. “With DERs, you’re not going to run out of fuel or have to take the whole plant offline; they’re stable resources if managed correctly.”
It’s Not Technology That’s Missing: It’s Incentives
Golden believes that the technology needed to decarbonize the grid is largely already available. The natural barrier is not lack of innovation–it’s incentives. “Honestly, I think if we didn’t innovate at all, we could do it with what we’ve got today,” he says. “Innovation is awesome, and I’m all for it, but I think the most important driver will be aligning incentives at the core.”
Golden’s vision is as practical as it is ambitious. He doesn’t dream of breakthroughs but of a world where existing technologies are used to their full potential. “All of the technology and business model innovation is equally, if not more important than technological innovation—maybe even more so. This happens when competition and the right incentives are in place. The better we account for greenhouse gas impacts and compensate for them, the more effectively people will find ways to address these challenges.”
Pay-for-Performance Works and Is Proven
In California, Recurve could test pay-for-performance models in practice, focusing on commercial energy efficiency retrofits. Through the California Market Access program, Recurve demonstrates how pay-for-performance allows businesses to earn financial incentives by delivering measurable energy savings, shifting peak demand, and ultimately stabilizing the grid.
By utilizing its FLEXmarket platform, Recurve enables these participants to track and verify energy reductions in real-time, making both environmental and economic impacts transparent and accountable. This practical application of pay-for-performance not only helps businesses manage energy costs but also supports California's energy resiliency goals by reducing peak load stress on the grid, proving that market-driven energy efficiency can be a viable strategy for broader grid sustainability.
Leveling the Playing Field for a New Kind of Resource
Golden’s vision is one where energy efficiency is no longer the “poor cousin” of energy resources but a fully integrated, reliable grid component. "The whole goal is how do we take these bespoke assets...and put in place the systems that allow for homogenization and an aggregation of these projects into portfolios that can get financed, insured, and integrated into the grid."
In Golden’s world, energy efficiency isn’t an afterthought; it’s a measurable, reliable resource contributing meaningfully to the journey toward a decarbonized future. There’s a paradox at its heart: effective energy management requires a careful, data-driven use of resources before savings can follow. But as Golden says, “You have to use energy to save it.”