Brattle did a great report on Demand Flexibility - short version found at this @UtilityDive article. The article (and the report?) repeat, however, the common fallacy that "Utility Control is needed to unlock demand flexibility." A thread: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/two-barriers-to-utility-and-customer-savings-with-flexible-loads-and-how-re/592084/

2/ Why is this thinking so pervasive? Maybe because I was not in the Energy Industry (IT) for a decade I still think like an outsider, but the paradigm of the industry is "I have to control it for it to exist." That's just not how the world works anymore!

3/The world is much too complex for centralized control. We will unlock demand flexibility not through DERMS and utility command and control, but through price signals, aggregators, and a more nested, distributed control architecture.

4/ @shinynew_oz of @CamusEnergy calls this approach "Orchestration" and @NREL calls it "the autonomous grid." Sure, utilities could directly control large systems, but most stuff (EV's, smart thermostats, water heaters) should respond to price, or be aggregated into a fleet

5/Like @ciscodv and @ohmconnect or @Sunrun. Why does this basic assumption that we need massive upgrades to our communications infrastructure - @SCE wrote an otherwise excellent white paper that calls for 5G for low latency control of customer devices.

6/Utilities and ISO's need to stop worrying and learn to love aggregation, price responsive demand, and stochastic response. They don't need to control thousands of thermostats and EV chargers. They just need to build an architecture that ...

7/allows devices (and the customers that program them) to make intelligent decisions about when to charge, curtail, export, etc. Think internet routing protocol, not SCADA. Think markets, not command and control. Think different. /END