Demand response in the electricity sector is now worth billions of dollars and over 30 gigawatts of capacity in the United States. It’s a useful tool for utilities and grid operators trying to manage the real-time balance of supply and demand for a form of energy that’s very hard to store.
Natural gas is much more easily stored than electricity — but it still has its own peak demand and bottleneck challenges. And as we’ve seen with California’s shutdown of the Aliso Canyon natural gasstoragesite, the links between these two energy resources are becoming much tighter, as natural gas makes up a larger and larger share of electricity generation.
