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For the past few years I’ve been negative on home energy management. Sales were slow. And hundreds of companies were fighting for a piece of that tiny pie. (Yes, I said hundreds. Research firm Groom Energy has identified more than 300 companies in the energy management space.)

Today I’m going to reverse my stand and predict that the sector is about to turn the corner, starting now, accelerating in 2013 and becoming widely known in 2014. Sales are rising (albeit gradually). And at least four companies are starting to separate themselves from the pack. Opower and Aclara in the data presentment subsector. And Tendril and Silver Spring Networks in data presentment + device control.

In this article, I want to talk about Tendril and its prospects. As widely reported in the press, Tendril recently went through layoffs. Today it has 160 employees, with four offices in the U.S. and one in Australia.

Despite the layoffs, I think the company is positioned for a rebound. First, the sector is slowly ticking up. Pike Research says the category will grow at 38 percent per year to reach $2 billion by 2020. Groom Energy is even more optimistic. It says the energy management software category (which includes commercial and industrial as well) is already a $5.2 billion industry in North America alone and is growing at 40 percent per year.

Second, the company is positioning itself to be a leader in the next phase, which — as I’ll explain below — will be about automation.

Tendril’s beginnings

Tendril began by creating a platform to connect wireless sensors, with an emphasis on the ZigBee protocol. Once that had been accomplished, the company started to look for problems that its solution could solve – that is, to look for sectors that would soon have many wireless sensors on the network.

Tendril dabbled in building automation and parking automation and home health before stumbling upon the nascent smart metering market. The company reoriented itself to sell to utilities because “when we started, there were very few ZigBee-enabled devices except for smart meters,” explains Ivo Steklac, Chief Sales and Strategy Officer.

Tendril’s first order of business was to solve the connectivity piece – to learn to talk back and forth with all the meters and other devices. Once that was accomplished, it started to look for additional value it could provide from that connectivity. And from all the data it was collecting.

Tendril Products

That quest for added value led Tendril to purchase Grounded Power, a startup using behavioral science for customer engagement. It is that technology that forms the core of Tendril’s current differentiation. (But I predict it will NOT be the heart of the next phase, as we’ll discuss.)

Tendril’s current differentiator

When I asked Ivo Steklac how Tendril differs from the competition, he made this claim: “We are the only company that does both consumer engagement and consumer enablement.” Whether or not you agree that Tendril is unique in this regard, you should pay attention to the company’s dual goals. Eventually, every utility needs to achieve both.

The first piece is engagement – getting consumers to pay attention to and to sign up for utility programs. Utilities have several tools here, including paper reports, online portals and social media.

Tendril wants to see its utility clients move to an online presence as soon as possible “because that is where you can best accomplish the second piece – enablement,” says Steklac. Enablement means providing consumers tools that give them more control over their bills and their energy use. With the software provided by Tendril, for instance, utilities can give customers personalized energy-saving recommendations; or offer them new tools such as communicating thermostats; or sign them up to special programs. It is online that a utility can “recommend action and fulfill it at the same time,” he explains. “The software lets you have a dialogue with customers, not just deliver a speech.”

The power of variables

To make those customized recommendations, the Tendril software considers 600 to 700 energy variables, including but not limited to:

• Building envelope: age, size, number of levels, attic, basement, garage, aspect ratio, building orientation, age, internal mass, roof construction, roof reflectance, etc.
• HVAC: age, type, efficiency, zoning factor, cooling schedule, setback schedule, etc.
• Weather data:  temperature, humidity, wind speed, insolation etc.
• Pool/hot tub: size, heated, heating fuel, solar cover, etc.
• Lighting: types, quantity, hours of operation, home/work schedules, etc.
• Occupancy: number of occupants, ages, home/work schedules, etc.
• Kitchen: appliances, electric/gas, load, efficiency, appliance schedules
• Laundry: washer, dryer (electric/gas), loads, efficiency, water consumption, etc.
• Electronics: number and type (TVs, cable boxes, DVDs, audio, PC’s/laptops, tablets, cell phones, cable modems, gaming consoles, printers), schedules, etc.
• Water heater and use: age, fuel type, rated input (BTU/hr), water temp, delivery temp, energy factor efficiency, recovery efficiency, use hrs/gallons, etc.
• Solar electric: array tilt, azimuth, efficiency, temp coeff, inverter load curve, nominal power, etc.

The software can also use its behavioral model to make offers only to those customers most likely to sign up.

What comes after engagement and empowerment?

Tendril has been perfecting customer engagement and empowerment in concert with utility partners. (To learn more about Tendril’s utility partnerships, click the links below to review the slides and/or watch replays from two recent webinars.)

• Leveraging Behavioral Science for Persistent Customer Engagement featuring Kansas City Power & Light
• The Science of Customer Engagement featuring Duke Energy

The next step, Steklac tells me, will be to move toward automation, and I heartily agree. I’ve long argued that relying on consumers to change behavior is at best a stopgap. It will be far better and far easier to train devices to be smart about energy than to train every customer.

I’m talking here about automated demand response and automated energy efficiency. I’m talking about a future world of smart, connected appliances; of grid-connected HVAC systems; of grid-savvy electric vehicles; and of many other smart devices, all of them connected by an underlying control platform.

Tendril Insight

I think autoDR and autoEE are poised for growth because:

1. The autoDR spec is out
2. The SEP 2.0 profile is finally ready
3. Hardware prices are coming down
4. Utilities are realizing what a pain it is to rely on fickle consumers to change their behavior in order to meet your goals.

The upshot: Right now Tendril is battling with Opower to be the best at behavioral science. In the future, they’ll need to be the best at controlling devices. Certainly Aclara and Silver Spring see this future too. And I can only assume that Opower is working with Honeywell and other partners to bolster its device capabilities.

So Tendril wants to grow from its current behavioral emphasis to be the leader in the automation phase. And they have a reasonable shot at success, especially when you consider that this evolution actually takes them back to their roots as a control platform.

(What comes after automation? Optimization in near real time… but I will leave that to a future analysis.)

Challenges

I see at least eight challenges Tendril must overcome. (Most of them apply equally to Tendril’s rivals, by the way.)

1. Getting to scale. I believe 2013 will be the get-big-or-go-home year in home energy management. Or at least “get big enough to seem stable.” Utilities may do pilots with tiny startups. But when it comes to system-wide deployments, they want a partner who is sure to be around for the long haul. As we move out of the trial phase and into the deployment phase, utilities will want to know that companies are past the “valley of death” and close to cash-flow positive. I think the leaned-down Tendril is within striking distance.
2. Providing lots of energy management applications. Both utilities and consumers will want to know how many apps the company has in its “apps store.” Tendril is beginning to have a strong story in that regard, thanks to its long-term platform orientation and its Tendril application developer support program.
3. Overcoming consumer apathy. Only a small percentage of customers really care about managing their energy. For the rest, the effort is just not worth the $5-$10 per month in typical savings. Only when the industry finally gets to automated systems will utilities truly be able to tap into residential demand response. Which brings us to…
4. Automating demand response and energy efficiency. We are all coming to realize that relying on consumers to change their behavior is not a great long-term solution. Far better to automate as much as possible (while still allowing customers to set their preferred parameters, of course). Achieving that automation will be Tendril’s next big hill to climb – and the computational challenge will be even steeper than with its current behavioral approaches. Here companies like Tendril and Silver Spring may have an edge over companies focused primarily on behavior.
5. Overcoming regulatory hurdles. It’s not just that Tendril needs regulatory mandates and incentives to “persuade” utilities to adopt demand response and energy efficiency. It’s also that some PUCs are suspicious of targeted marketing. Tendril’s mantra is personalization, giving customers only what they are most likely to want. Some PUCs believe that anything offered to one customer set must be offered to all customers, at the same time and on the same terms.
6. Expanding past residential. Some utilities may prefer to deal with one partner for all customer programs, whether residential, commercial or industrial. Can Tendril grow beyond its residential roots? And should it? Or should it remain focused on consumers? The real action these days is in small- to mid-sized commercial. What’s more, many companies currently focused on commercial & industrial have residential in their sights next.
7. Competition from adjacent sectors. Yes, I believe the home energy management space will see some failures and some consolidation, reducing the confusion. On the other hand, dozens of companies from adjacent sectors are crowding into the residential space. All this noise makes it hard to get noticed no matter how good your offering.
   For example, here is a partial list of overlapping sectors. I’ve included an example for each, but in reality each category has many competitors: big box retailers (Lowe’s), cable companies (Comcast), home security companies (ADT), controls vendors (Schneider), demand response providers (Comverge), energy efficiency specialists (C3), metering companies (Aclara), smart device makers (Nest), unified operations centers (Calico Energy), utilities on their own (ConEd).
8. Venture capital overhang. Tendril has obtained roughly $90 million in venture funding and convertible debt. Some of it comes from industry sources such as Siemens Venture Capital and GE who can be presumed to have a long-term view. But some of it comes from independent VCs who may have a shorter horizon. VCs typically want their money back — plus a fat return — in a relatively short time frame. And some of those VCs can get pushy if a successful exit fails to materialize on schedule. (Just ask GridPoint.) If they lose faith, they may press Tendril to accept a less-than-ideal buyout offer from a larger firm, or otherwise compromise Tendril’s options.

If you want evidence of Tendril’s progress, click to view a recent Tendril press release that documents some of the company’s recent milestones. And feel free to use the Comment form below to agree, disagree or expand on my commentary.

You may also want to read…

• Opower moving into devices as energy management battle heats up
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From the SGN Research Marketplace…

Building the Technology Framework for Home Energy Management: This IDC

Energy Insights report provides analysis of the home energy management (HEM) technology stack based on our interviews with utility decision makers including chief information officers (CIOs) and solution providers. Many utilities are somewhere on the continuum of piloting programs such as demand response, load control, energy efficiency, and customer education; all of them could involve home energy management. Get details here.

Jesse Berst is the founder and chief analyst of Smart Grid News.com, the industry’s oldest and largest smart grid site. A frequent keynoter at industry events in the U.S. and abroad, he also serves on advisory committees for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Institute for Electric Efficiency. He often provides strategic consulting to large corporations and venture-backed startups. He is a member of the advisory boards of GridGlo and Calico Energy Services.

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The buyout offer would deliver Comverge shareholders $1.75 a share, which is a 6.9 percent discount to its closing price on Friday reports the Wall Street Journal. The move would take the company private, and Comverge says it will “solicit alternative acquisition proposals from third parties for a period of 30 days.”

Comverge is a demand response aggregator, which means it turns down power-using equipment in commercial and industrial sites to help utilities manage peak energy consumption on the power grid. The company started a rebranding effort back in 2010, but Comverge’s shares have plummeted over the past couple of years.

Recently Comverge’s independent auditor found that there was substantial doubt about Comverge’s ability to continue as a going concern. In addition Comverge says its primary and secondary lienholders have issued amortization and default notices.

The affiliate of H.I.G. Capital, Peak Merger Corp, says it will provide $12 million in debt financing to Comverge.

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A few of the stocks I covered yesterday are still down — like EnerNOC, but that’s due to company-specific issues. Most are slightly up, though many didn’t return to the trading levels pre-market sell-off. Here’s a run down on where the stocks I covered yesterday are at this morning:

Solar

• Solar panel maker SunPower up 3.06 percent.
• Chinese solar panel maker Suntech rises 4.13 percent.
• Thin-film solar maker First Solar is still down .40 percent.

Biofuels

• Biofuel maker Gevo is back up 10.87 percent.
• Algae oil company Solazyme is up 3.07 percent.
• Biofuel maker KiOR is down even more: 3.50 percent.
• Biofuel maker Amyris is up 0.75 percent.

Electric car and batteries

• Lithium ion battery maker A123 Systems is up 11.70 percent.
• Electric car maker Tesla Motors is up 5.67 percent.
• Battery maker Ener1 is up 6.75 percent.

Smart grid

• Smart meter and network maker Itron is up 5.14 percent.
• Demand response company Comverge is down even more, by 1.38 percent.
• Demand response leader EnerNOC crashed even more, by 36.98 percent . (Yesterday’s market crash is combined with EnerNOC’s own weak earnings statement and a downgraded position to hold by a prominent analyst).
• Smart meter and network maker Echelon is back up by 5.51 percent.

Random:

• Car sharing company Zipcar is up 2.75 percent. It hasn’t fully recovered from yesterday.
• Clean Energy Fuels, which makes natural gas infrastructure for gas-powered cars, is still down by 5.80 percent.

Image courtesy of dizznbonn.

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While we’ve looked into many of the questions that last month’s proposed ruling from the California Public Utility Commission has raised, in my weekly update at GigaOm Pro (subscription required), I lay out some of the key points of contention suggested in the recent comments from smart grid industry players.

Chief among them is the fear that some of the CPUC’s definitions lack clarity, and that this vagueness could cause uncertainty and a delay in rolling out products and services to link homeowners and business owners to their energy use. The CPUC’s definition of “locked” versus un-”locked” home energy management devices is particularly troubling for the commenters. In fact, the the Consumer Electronics Association believes the distinction “threatens to dictate technology standards through regulatory favoritism.”

Other disagreements include a dispute over standards for connecting smart meters to in-home devices using wireless technology. The CPUC’s rules demand that California’s big three utilities make plans for piloting such meter-to-home connections within six months, but the rules don’t address how they’re supposed to do it.

The question around standards, in turn, brings up the question of whether it’s better to use the existing ZigBee standard, or wait for the next-generation of the ZigBee standard, which will be compliant with Internet protocol and able to be used via Wi-Fi and HomePlug devices as well as ZigBee. Pacific Gas & Electric wants to wait for the next-gen ZigBee standard to be developed, but that could take more than a year, given the current struggles over the standard.

The Demand Response and Smart Grid Coalition trade group, on the other hand, wants the CPUC to demand that it happens now. That’s not surprising, perhaps, given that its members include companies like Comverge, Tendril, Control4 and others using the first generation of the ZigBee standard in deployments today, not to mention the ZigBee Alliance itself.

Finally, amid all these confusions, it may seem that defining just who a utility “customer” is should be pretty simple, but that’s not always the case. For example, the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed out in their comments that the CPUC’s rules could leave residential and commercial tenants in an unclear position. Tenants might not be paying the bills and also might not be due the same protections and disclosures when it comes to their energy usage data.

Image courtesy of Portland General Electric via Creative Commons license

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EnerNOC reported a loss of $19.3 million, or 76 cents per share, on revenues of $31.8 million in the first quarter, compared to a loss of $14.2 million, or 59 cents per share, on revenues of $28.1 million in the same quarter in 2010.

It’s important to note that EnerNOC reports the majority of its revenues in the second and third quarters of the year, when its biggest demand response contracts pay out. Its overall trends have been toward profitability, however, and in February EnerNOC reported a profit of $9.8 million for 2010, compared to a $6.8 million loss in the previous year.

Beyond those seasonal earnings factors, EnerNOC also spent a lot of money on acquisitions in the first quarter. That included the completion of the $26.5 million purchase of California-based Global Energy Partners it first announced in December, as well as the January purchase of M2M Communications, a company that specializes in agricultural demand response, and the purchase of an unnamed “small international demand response provider,” according to Wednesday’s release.

All in all, EnerNOC’s cash and cash equivalents fell by $50.8 million in the first quarter, to stand at $102.6 million as of March 31, 2011. The majority of that decrease was due to acquisitions, the company stated in Wednesday’s release.

At the same time, EnerNOC’s business growth kept chugging along in the first quarter. Core demand response projects grew to about 6,300 MW as of the end of March, up from about 5,300 MW at the end of 2010. While most of EnerNOC’s business is with mid-Atlantic grid operator PJM, it also added business in New England and with the Bonneville Power Administration in the Pacific Northwest.

But EnerNOC has also been building up its energy efficiency business, built on several acquisitions it has made over the last few years. The first quarter saw the company add a big new customer for its energy efficiency business: utility Southern California Edison, which will help cover part of up-front costs for customers who sign up for the program.

EnerNOC also got a couple of regulatory boosts in the first quarter. In March, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued an order laying the groundwork for demand response providers to earn prices for their power reductions that are equal to the prices power plants get for the electricity they produce — a rule that could lead to increased revenues for demand response providers like EnerNOC, Comverge and others.

EnerNOC also got a boost from FERC in early March, when the commission ruled that the company hadn’t broken any rules in the way it accounted for demand response — something that PJM had accused the company of doing in February. PJM is now asking FERC for permission to change its market rules in a way that could reduce EnerNOC’s revenues, as EnerNOC executives conceded in a Wednesday conference call.

Excluding that possibility, EnerNOC is predicting its full year 2011 revenues will fall to between $300 million to $320 million, and projects net income will be in the range of 25 cents to 50 cents per share, compared to 2010’s earnings of 37 cents per share.

Outside the scope of the quarter, EnerNOC reported that it entered into a $75 million senior secured revolving credit facility with Silicon Valley Bank and TD Bank in April. That replaces a previous $50 million credit facility for funding credit requirements to grid operators and utilities that demand response aggregators must pledge to secure their contracts.

Photo courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory via Creative Commons license.

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The Network

Digi has been a player in industrial M2M networking for over two decades, selling modems, communications modules, gateways and similar devices to companies in the industrial, transportation and health care fields, and has been weathering the economic downturn well, with revenues and profits increasing over the past two years. More recently it has gotten some traction in the smart grid industry as well, largely as a provider of ZigBee-based network gateways for in-home energy management systems, allowing in-home devices to connect with smart meters or broadband systems that can then connect back to third-party management systems or utility control rooms.

Digi’s technology now enables about 140,000 smart meter-to-home gateways in the field, mostly through its long-term contracts to manage the iThermostat program from Texas energy retailer TXU and demand response provider Comverge. From there, Digi has expanded to supply networking gear and support for smart thermostat and control platform partner Cooper Industries, and is helping major U.S. smart meter vendor Itron link its older, one-way communicating ERT meters to two-way networks.

Digi also provides the gateway to link up Schneider Electric’s new line of Wiser home energy management gear, and will be linking smart meters from Elster in a smart meter-smart home pilot in Naperville, Ill., to name some more partnerships.

In an interesting side note, Cisco’s home energy management display at the February 2011 DistribuTECH show featured a home dashboard unit from startup OpenPeak that appeared to be connected with one of Digi’s XBee ZigBee modules. A query to Cisco about its relationship with Digi hadn’t received a reply by the time this article was posted, however, and it isn’t clear which ZigBee networking partners, if any, new Cisco home energy partner Control4 might be using in its projects with the networking giant.

Apps & Services

In building these partnerships, Digi has collected a set of networked devices — as well as networking protocols beyond ZigBee — that as of late 2010 provided more data transactions per minute than Facebook and Twitter combined, Jordan Husney, solutions architect for Digi, told me last month.

That growing market share, in turn, has given Digi the opportunity to move past its traditional role as just a networking “plumbing company,” as Husney put it, and into a position of providing a cross-vendor smart grid network that can deliver the company’s own services and applications.

In March 2009, Digi launched what it calls “iDigi Energy,” a bundled hardware, hosted software and services platform for home energy networking adapted from a similar, cloud-hosted system called ConnectPort that Digi built for companies in the oil and gas monitoring industry. The iDigi Energy system allows network management, Web services, remote firmware upgrades and all the other functions that can become more difficult to manage as the number of devices grows from a handful to the thousands or millions, Husney explained. The product also comes with an application programming interface (API) that can be used by partners to write applications to perform home energy-specific tasks, such as isolating individual appliances and power loads in the home or connecting price data to energy use.

Digi has combined its gateways, modules and iDigi platform into what it calls its X-Grid, or extended grid, solutions platform. Lots of Digi customers are using various pieces of the X-Grid that include writing applications and hosting services on the iDigi cloud platform. Comverge, for example, has used it to upgrade iThermostats to deliver more frequent temperature and run time data on home air conditioners, David Mayne, Digi’s director of business development, told me in an interview earlier this month.

Another example is smart thermostat management startup EcoFactor, which has been using Digi’s platform to connect thermostats to EcoFactor’s own cloud-based software that helps fine-tune thermostats in homes to save energy for customers including Texas utility Oncor. Using Digi allows EcoFactor to connect to a variety of smart thermostats and manage them in a secure and reliable network, all while pulling data every 60 seconds or so via broadband connections in homes, Scott Hublou, EcoFactor co-founder and senior vice president of products, told me in a recent interview.

“A lot of people are using that Digi conduit to get access to their data,” he noted. “They’re a pure infrastructure kind of play, but a critical piece of infrastructure.”

The Cloud

Digi’s latest cloud-based, hosted product is part of a growing trend of smart grid companies leveraging the benefits of the cloud to manage the scaling-up of a growing array of sensor-enabled, remote-controlled, energy-aware devices.

In the U.K., home energy and security startup and Google PowerMeter partner AlertMe is using a cloud computing platform to manage devices it’s testing with utility British Gas, and startup Intamac is using the cloud to link in-home devices in Europe and Australia. In the U.S., Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup People Power is plotting a similar cloud services energy management platform, both to control its in-house wireless energy management modules it’s hoping to embed in a number of third party appliances, and devices made by others.

Cisco, IBM and Microsoft are all rolling out cloud computing platforms for managing energy-smart, interconnected urban environments. In Cisco’s case, that may include home energy management partners like Control4, which is working with Cisco. Demand response — turning down power loads in factories, office buildings or homes to help utilities manage peak power loads — is also moving toward cloud services, as Lockheed Martin’s launch of a cloud-based smart meter and demand response platform for cooperative utilities earlier this month indicates.

Likewise, smart meter data management software vendor eMeter’s decision to offer cloud-hosted services with Verizon earlier this year indicates how managing the terabytes of data to come from new smart grid systems could require utility IT systems to scale up in a big way.

The Standards Challenge

All of these cloud computing-based services could hit a speed bump given the variety of standards floating around the smart grid. Take the race for home energy networking dominance between ZigBee and other wireless standards like Z-Wave, Wi-Fi and even cellular. Startups like Tendril and EnergyHub and giants like General Electric are all using ZigBee for home energy networking today, but others are contemplating these other networking technologies.

The complications extend to just how data is carried from in-home networks back up to the utility back-office system — or the cloud computing platform. Millions of smart meters are now being deployed with the ability to connect wirelessly to home energy management systems, but then, homes can also be linked via broadband connections, cellular communications, and other proprietary technologies. Then there’s the networks for demand response, variable pricing signals, customer support and billing, and interconnections to utility grid operations and maintenance systems.

It could get even more complicated as other systems, like rooftop solar panels and wind turbines enter the picture, Digi’s Husney said. Little surprise, then, that Digi’s radios now reside in wind turbines makers and solar power inverters as well, he said. Digi recently launched a solar photovoltaic monitoring project with inverter and monitoring company SolarEdge, which could one day provide a linkage between home energy management and solar and wind power systems.

Image courtesy of Digi International.

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Next comes the complicated task of making the nation’s power markets meet the rule. FERC’s order (PDF) will require wholesale energy operators to pay demand response resources the market price for energy, known as the “locational marginal price,” or LMP, as long as they can balance supply and demand as well as a generation resource. The rule applies to the Regional Transmission Operators (RTOs) and Independent System Operators (ISOs) that manage about two-thirds of the nation’s grid.

It’s early yet, but you can expect a slew of announcements today from big demand response providers like EnerNOC, Comverge and Constellation Energy praising FERC’s decision. Right now most of the demand response capacity in the country is managed in a piecemeal fashion, with many different prices paid for participation in different programs, most of them separated from the markets where energy is traded.

Even when demand response is permitted to participate in these more lucrative energy markets, it tends to receive less money per “negawatt” than does generated energy — usually by subtracting some portion of the power reduction’s retail price if the customer had used it. Power generators have supported these arrangements, arguing that giving full market price of negawatts constitutes double dipping — not only are utility customers saving money on power bills, they’re also getting to earn money by bidding that energy savings into the market.

But FERC’s order calls for a wholesale change to all these programs, by requiring all RTOs and ISOs to set up new tests to determine when demand response will be cheaper than generation to accomplish the same grid-balancing tasks.

It won’t happen right away. RTOs and ISOs have until July 22, 2011 to file compliance statements that set tariffs and threshholds for the new rule, FERC stated Tuesday. By September 21, 2012, the RTOs and ISOs will be required to submit results of studies that demonstrate “the requirements for and effects of directly determining the cost-effective dispatch of demand response resources in both the day-ahead and real-time energy markets,” FERC’s order states.

That makes sense, given the complications involved in adding a whole new class of participant to the confusing array of programs that buy and sell energy to balance grid frequency and voltage, supply emergency peak power and perform other functions.

But FERC has long held that these kinds of market changes will be needed to help demand response realize its full potential. FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff has called it the “killer app” of the smart grid. Indeed, in a recent dispute over demand response market rules between Mid-Atlantic grid operator PJM and demand response providers including EnerNOC, FERC ruled in demand response’s favor — an indication of where the commission’s sympathies lie.

Image courtesy of Matti.Frisk via Creative Commons license.

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