Terry Rohrer Spent a Career Teaching the Grid to Listen

An irrigation pump is not anybody's idea of a glamorous power plant. It stands in a field, moves water, and goes unnoticed until it stops. But gather a few thousand of them, give each a reliable control signal, measure what happens next, and the collection begins to resemble a resource an electric utility can call upon. This is the practical corner of the energy transition where Terry Rohrer has spent much of his career: making ordinary machines coordinated, visible and useful.

Rohrer is a software engineer by training and an executive by accumulated responsibility. At Connected Energy, formerly BPL Global, his title has stretched across chief technology officer, chief strategy officer and senior vice president of marketing. It is an ungainly cluster until you consider the assignment. Grid software has to work, fit a utility's operating reality, communicate with equipment from different manufacturers, survive scrutiny from auditors and make enough sense to be purchased. Engineering and explanation share the same circuit.

His public career is not built around a celebrity founder's epiphany. It looks more like a series of handoffs mastered: from code to teams, teams to products, products to standards, and standards to equipment in the field. The thread is connection. His early leadership roles at ABB and IBM/Sterling Commerce put him near large systems and strategic planning. He later founded Innovent Consulting, a small business and technology firm that helped software and services companies launch products. Clients included IBM/Sterling Commerce and Automation Control Technologies. Then, in 2009, he joined BPL Global.

01 / The useful middleWhere code meets the control room

The electric grid used to be described neatly: large generators pushed power in one direction through transmission and distribution lines toward customers. The modern version is crowded at the edges. Rooftop solar sends power back. Batteries charge and discharge. Thermostats, electric vehicles, water heaters and industrial equipment can shift when they use electricity. The hardware is distributed; responsibility for keeping the system balanced is not.

Rohrer has repeatedly described the software problem through the devices themselves. When BPL Global became Connected Energy in 2018, his inventory of the advanced grid included solar, wind, storage, smart thermostats, air conditioning, heat, irrigation, hot-water heaters, electric vehicles, pool pumps, microgrids and smart homes. It sounded like a hardware store had collided with a utility control center. That was precisely the point. The new company name acknowledged that value had migrated from any single box to the orchestration among them.

“Today's advanced grid requires intelligent software capable of managing solar, wind, storage, smart thermostats, A/C, heat, irrigation, hot water heaters, EV, pool pumps, microgrids, smart homes, and more.”Terry Rohrer, 2018

A list this long also contains a warning. Every device category arrives with its own manufacturer, protocol, customer habit and physical constraint. A pump cannot be treated like a thermostat, and a thermostat cannot be dispatched like a battery. The job is to make their differences legible without pretending they have disappeared.

02 / A common languageThe protocol is part of the product

Rohrer's work has included participation in IETF, EMA, EPRI, OpenADR and CommerceNet groups, the sort of alphabet soup that quietly determines whether complex systems cooperate. In demand response, a standard signal allows a utility or program operator to ask enrolled equipment to change its consumption. Standardization narrows the number of custom translations required each time a device, vendor or utility joins the conversation.

He made the case directly while endorsing an OpenADR implementation guide: BPL Global had enabled the technology in its Connected Energy platform, and he called the guide and certification program a step toward standardizing demand-response technology and practice. The sentiment is technical, but the ambition is social. Standards are agreements among organizations that would otherwise arrive with their own dialects and deadlines.

That interest moved beyond committee work. In 2017, Rohrer appeared on BPL Global's team for a U.S. Department of Energy ENERGISE project called ProDROMOS. Sandia National Laboratories led the effort, with Georgia Tech, SunSpec Alliance, EPRI, SunPower, National Grid and PNM among the collaborators. The goal was to bring advanced solar forecasting, state estimation, voltage regulation, protection and economic optimization into an open software platform. BPL Global's responsibilities covered software architecture, programming management and DERMS deployment.

The project's slides were rich in the realities beneath broad promises: feeder telemetry, minute-by-minute solar forecasts, hardware-in-the-loop simulations, cyber assessments, standardized data flows and field demonstrations. Rohrer occupied the useful middle again, where research components have to become something deployable.

His education fits that pattern. Rohrer studied computer science at DeVry University from 1983 to 1986, then kept moving through successive generations of enterprise technology. In 2021, his professional profile recorded a new certificate in computational thinking. The item is modest, almost comically so beside vice-presidential titles, yet it suggests continuity: the habits learned when memory was scarce and networks were slower still mattered in a world of cloud services and millions of endpoints. Tools date quickly. Decomposing a problem, naming its constraints and testing what happens at the boundaries does not. Utility technology makes that permanence unusually visible. A grid may acquire new sensors and smarter inverters, but every additional capability creates another dependency that has to be understood, secured and operated by people who inherit the system later.

03 / Proof, not theaterCapacity that survives the weather

The great temptation in software is to confuse a dashboard with the world. Demand-response programs are less forgiving. If a utility commits capacity into a market, it needs a reasonable expectation that the reduction will appear when called. Weather changes. Customers override thermostats. Devices drop offline. Crops still need water. The software must forecast the available response, choose resources, observe what happened and provide a defensible report.

At a 2018 industry conference, Rohrer and Entergy's Gerardo Galdamez presented lessons from agricultural and smart-thermostat programs. The agenda reached far beyond dispatch: recruitment, yield, market filings, auditing and energy efficiency. Five years later, Rohrer joined an Entergy Arkansas session about using smart-thermostat program data to deliver levelized reductions for events of varying duration and support a bid into the Midcontinent Independent System Operator market. The phrase “levelized reductions” is dry. Its meaning is not. A jagged fleet of household devices has to become a steady promise.

Former colleagues describe the temperament behind that work. One recalled Rohrer arriving on a rescue project and quickly leading it through a transition. Another praised his combination of .NET, Java and SQL ability, big-picture thinking and technical-team management, adding that he was fun to work with. These are recommendations, not laboratory measurements, but together they sketch a recognizable operator: technically hands-on, inclined to see the full system, and willing to take responsibility when the handoff gets messy.

The grid's edge is a crowd. The craft is turning that crowd into capacity an operator can trust.The operating idea behind the work

04 / Another handoffA larger circuit

Connected Energy now says it manages more than 4,500 agricultural pumps and has served more than 75,000 utility-program participants. It also says its programs have delivered 100 percent of committed megawatts per event for more than a decade. These are company-wide figures, not personal trophies, which makes them appropriate measures of an executive whose work has centered on teams and systems.

In August 2026, CLEAResult acquired Connected Energy. The buyer highlighted the DERMS platform's event orchestration, optimization, visualization and performance reporting, along with direct-load-control hardware and the specialized agricultural practice. For Rohrer, it marked another handoff after seventeen years with BPL Global and Connected Energy: technology developed in a focused utility-software company moving into an organization with broader program-delivery reach.

There is a neatness to the arc, though infrastructure rarely stays neat for long. Rohrer began around enterprise systems, started a consultancy to help products reach the market, and then spent years connecting increasingly diverse machines to utility operations. The devices multiplied. The standards matured. The company changed its name and then its owner. The central problem remained recognizable: turn distributed behavior into dependable action.

Some careers are easy to photograph: a launch stage, a ringing bell, a product held aloft. Rohrer's is better pictured as a diagram full of arrows. A farm pump answers a signal. A thermostat fleet trims a peak. A solar forecast reaches an optimizer. A utility operator sees what happened. If it all works, the result is almost anticlimactic. The grid listens, responds and carries on.