Rewiring America – Kayla Cherry – 2025

Summary

Kayla Cherry analyzed barriers and identified opportunities to promote household enrollment in demand flexibility programs.

Goals

Rewiring America, a non-profit organization seeking to ?Electrify Everything for Everyone, hypothesized that demand response programs could offer affordability benefits to United States residents and the grid. These demand response programs, which harness residents’ electric appliances to shift energy use to lower-cost energy periods, have consistently missed opportunities to enroll residents during the critical point at which they get a new electric device. Rewiring America sought to gain a more nuanced understanding of how to bridge demand flexibility with the residential electrification process.

Solutions

Reviewing 17 demand response studies and interviewing 13 stakeholders, Kayla mapped out competing priorities across utilities, third-party service providers, HVAC contractors and residential customers. She identified new partnerships and incentive structures that could persuade these stakeholders to cooperate towards demand flexibility enrollment. She developed an internal report for the Policy team and external memo for Rewiring America’s partners to summarize her research. Kayla also reviewed several case studies of successful demand flexibility programs and identified key characteristics of program design to emulate across utility jurisdictions. Finally, Kayla developed an economic model to quantify the net benefits of demand flexibility programs in terms of avoided grid energy and capacity costs. With her quantitative analysis, Rewiring America can incorporate state-specific estimates of demand flexibility program benefits in its advocacy on policy considering virtual power plants or amalgamations of grid-compatible electric devices. Demonstrating households’ flexible capacity potential can in turn unlock third-party funding to help households participate in demand response.

Potential Impact

A total electrification scenario in which all single-family households in Colorado, Minnesota, and New York enrolled their space and water energy use in demand flexibility would avoid 9.6 million metric tons of CO2 emissions from power plants that otherwise would need to turn on to meet energy demand at peak hours of the summer and winter. Combining the social cost of carbon with avoided grid system costs that would be otherwise recovered through customer’s utility bills, total demand flexibility enrollment results in societal benefits approximating $2.2 billion annually.Having an understanding of demand flexibility’s economic impact on household electrification allows the External Affairs team to better argue for the role of households in meeting peak demand driven by increasing energy use (e.g., by data centers).