It’s a change to the legacy way of operating generation on the grid. The last time there was a signifiant change, and all of this was predicted long before it happened, there was too much solar during the middle of the day, but electric rates still had a premium for midday consumption. This was out of step for utilities and system operators who were dealing with curtailment on the supply side and lack of demand on the consumption side.
There are several simple solutions. The PUC and leaders in energy figured out that demand response or demand management, local aggregated generation, local aggregated demand response, storage, and other methods such as EIM, energy imbalance markets, and a better coordination of supply and demand between larger regions could work on both the supply and consumption side to ease the problem. Right now, the amounts of utility storage are small.
Here, there is a goal to connect market mechanisms, retail rates, to wholesale, and to connect utility and other generation providers and customer demand to supply in a more coordinated way to lower costs and make the system work better. Second, some of its responses, energy storage, early evening rate premiums, aggregated demand management, and other things worked to reduce the issue.
Demand response programs have not all gone perfectly. In fact, the CPUC decided to sunset one, but that decision has had mixed reviews., Demand Response Aggregator Market, an auction for demand response mechanisms, but now it is ending it in response to utility requests. This move has mixed reviews.One of them is OhmConnect, a service I considered at one time.
While this solution and other DR and DRP solutions work, I am a bit disappointed that a more modern, automatic system is not yet used for DR. I envisioned a system where smart devices were under voluntary control via direct means via the internet. The system would allow users to control how much and if they chose to participate via an app that they control.