When Will Demand Response Be as Accepted as Daylight Savings Time?
Demand response has been around for many years, but it still hasn't caught on at a national level here in the US. Participants still are pioneers -- they need a willingness to wade through the options and paperwork, not to mention dealing with immature technologies and managing their programs with sketchy data.
When will demand response become a mainstream resource? I went to America's most progressive state for demand response, and asked the top regulator and top grid operator to get specific about when demand response will be commonplace. (podcast)
March 19, 2007
Podcast
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Music by Chris Keister
Program notes
At a demand response seminar in San Jose, California, I talked with Sean Gallagher, director of the Energy Division of the California Public Utilities Commission, and Jim Detmers, vice president of operations for the California ISO. I asked them in what year demand response would be as widely accepted as daylight savings time or unleaded gasoline.Listen to the podcast to hear their answers.
Their outlook sounds pretty optimistic for the United States, but doable for more progressive markets, such as Europe. Most countries in the European Union have just one electric utility, often state-owned. There are some three thousand separate load-serving entities operating in the U.S.
In Europe, even though demand response isn't all that much more common than in the U.S., an essential technology of demand response is commonplace. That's the advanced metering infrastructure that Mr. Gallagher talked about in the interview. So it would be no surprise to see the EU accelerating well past the United States in demand response, if for no other reason than that they're already technologically so far ahead.
