On September 2 2026, extreme heat pushed two of America’s largest electricity markets toward their operational limits.
PJM Interconnection issued a maximum-generation emergency, while the U.S. Department of Energy authorized additional backup generation to reduce the risk of rotating outages. At the same time, Midcontinent Independent System Operator expected demand to reach roughly 121 GW, approaching its 127.1-GW historical peak. Reuters
This is a useful reminder that the grid’s most valuable megawatt isn’t always another megawatt of generation.
Sometimes it is a megawatt we don’t need for the next two hours.
Consider the traditional reliability response:
Demand rises → generators ramp → reserves tighten → emergency generation starts → customers are eventually asked to conserve.
I think the architecture should increasingly become:
Demand rises → grid identifies constraints → DERMS identifies available flexibility → batteries discharge → flexible loads reduce consumption → distributed generation responds → customers are compensated.
That distinction matters.
America already has millions of potentially flexible assets sitting behind the meter: batteries, EV chargers, HVAC systems, commercial refrigeration, industrial processes, backup generation and increasingly enormous data-center loads.
The technical challenge is turning those individual devices into predictable grid resources.
That requires more than a demand-response enrollment portal.
Utilities need to know:
Where is the resource?
What grid asset is it connected to?
How many MW can it provide?
How quickly can it respond?
How long can it sustain the response?
Can dispatch create another distribution constraint?
That is where DERMS + ADMS + GIS + AMI + operating envelopes become particularly important.
A 100-MW demand-response event isn’t necessarily worth 100 MW everywhere on the system.
The location of those megawatts matters.
The network conditions matter.
And the ability to verify the response matters.
This week’s heat wave illustrates why I believe the next evolution of demand response is grid-aware demand response.
Instead of asking millions of customers to conserve broadly during emergencies, the grid should increasingly be capable of identifying and dispatching the flexibility that provides the greatest reliability value.
We absolutely need more generation, transmission and storage.
But we should also recognize something already sitting on the system:
Flexible demand is a power plant we haven’t fully connected yet.
Relevant reading: Reuters — Heat wave raises blackout risk across major U.S. grids, September 2 | EIA — Real-Time U.S. Electric Grid Monitor | EIA — Electric Power Monthly, August 25 release
#EnergyMarkets #DemandResponse #DERMS #GridModernization #GridReliability #PJM #MISO #GridFlexibility #VirtualPowerPlants #VPP #DistributedEnergy #BatteryStorage #ElectricGrid #Utilities #Energy
Photo courtesy Akanda Kilicarslan