August 1
Demand Response Decoded: Understanding the Customer Journey
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
When we discuss the future of demand response (DR), the conversation often jumps straight to kilowatts, controls and capacity. But let’s not forget that the success of every DR program depends on a single, often overlooked variable – people. If customers don’t know what DR is, don’t understand how it works or don’t see a reason to engage, even the most sophisticated program design won’t deliver results.
As electricity providers grapple with significant demand growth in the years ahead, customer-sited DERs, like rooftop solar and battery storage, are set to play an increasingly important role in maintaining grid reliability and resiliency. Accordingly, the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative (SECC) recently conducted the “Shining a Light on Solar + Storage: Consumer Interest and Expectations” survey to better understand how American homeowners view these technologies.
Duke Energy Florida finished work on the Sundance Renewable Energy Center in Madison County, Florida. This solar facility will generate 74.9 MW of clean energy that will be added to the electric grid. This, in turn, will generate significant savings for the company’s two million customers over its service lifetime. The Madison County solar site is the first of four new solar sites that Duke Energy Florida plans to build by the end of 2026.
Electric demand is on the rise, driven by supply chain challenges, erratic temperature extremes and volatile weather events, as well as the increased development of AI and data centers. Fortunately, VPPs aggregate and optimize diverse DERs, such as thermostats, solar panels, water heaters, battery storage and even EVs, to redistribute communally generated power or shift load to off-peak periods of usage through demand response, EV charging or other BYOD strategies.
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Industry News
The rooftop solar industry is facing an unprecedented crisis. Utilities are cutting incentives. Major residential solar installers and financiers have gone bankrupt. And sweeping legislation will soon cut off federal tax credits that have supported the sector for 20 years. But the fact remains that solar panels – and the batteries that increasingly accompany them – remain the cheapest and most easily deployable technologies available to serve the ever-hungry U.S. power grid.
Limited customer awareness remains a significant barrier to participation in residential demand response (DR) programs, Parks Associates and Resideo Grid Services said in a report released last month. Though smart thermostat adoption has doubled in eight years to reach 16 percent of households with Internet access, only about 20 percent of those households participate in a DR program, the report said.
The NARUC alumni? The ghosts of Christmas past? National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners Executive Director Tony Clark didn’t know quite what to call the panel of 10 former regulators who took the stage Tuesday afternoon at the NARUC Summer Policy Summit in Boston. Thankfully, unless they decide to take their show on the road, a clever moniker won’t matter much.
So far, 2025 has been a mixed bag for EV sales in the U.S. A record 607,089 EVs left the lot in the first six months of the year, Cox Automotive reports, but sales in the second quarter were still lower than in Q2 2024. A big part of that Q2 decline has to do with Tesla, which remains the U.S.’s top EV seller but has suffered stateside and around the world thanks to CEO Elon Musk’s stint in the White House.
