The market in which EnerNOC is focused is growing and changing rapidly as the nation's electricity grid grapples with modernization. As a result, Demand Response solutions are becoming ever more important to keeping the lights on and costs down for electric utilities throughout the country. EnerNOC's unique ability and experience to shed electrical load and provide distributed generation support in real time is gaining tremendous traction.

Although the current generation, transmission, and distribution system in the US has served the country well in the past, the nation's existing electricity grid is in serious need of modernization to serve the 21st century. However, the fundamental architecture of the system is 100 years old, and most of the basic technology is 1950's design. The electricity grid is now under great stress and needs to be updated quickly if it is to serve our more demanding and rapidly changing needs.

In order to provide the reliability, security, and service that customers need in coming years, we need to fully digitalize the grid. Every other sector of the nation's economy has made this transition, except for the electricity grid despite the fact that the grid is the most critical part of our entire infrastructure – the life blood of our daily lives. If the electricity grid fails or is taken out in a terrorist attack, for all practical purposes everything else screeches to a halt. We saw a clear example of this during the 2003 blackout in the East and Midwest.

What we need is a digitally-run, fully computerized power grid. One that is on-line and intelligent, self diagnosing, and self-healing. This is the analog to the Internet and our mobile phones. When a telephone branch circuit or switch goes down, calls are automatically rerouted without users ever knowing. Our electrical grid must be a newly configured network where power flows in all directions, that is capable of changing and reconfiguring itself in real time as the patterns of demand and supply change.

That's where EnerNOC comes in. As those demand and supply patterns shift, it becomes crucial to be able to respond with a combination of reducing demand and increasing distributed generation, particularly in key pockets of peak electricity load and congestion. EnerNOC's 24/7 Network Operations Center is the mark of the next generation of Demand Response capabilities. This includes EnerNOC's ability to monitor customer loads in real time, to respond to utility and system operator needs instantly via automated communications links to smart energy management systems at customer sites, and to provide verification of those changes. That's what makes the demand response resource such a viable and economical alternative to just building and running more and more generating units and power lines.

We can no longer afford to operate the way we used to. We need to deploy our resources instantly where it is most needed to meet demands for least cost operations, improved environmental performance, and high reliability and security.

There are significant programs underway to design the architecture for this new, modern electricity grid. The group I headed until recently, the Electricity Innovation Institute, along with its affiliate EPRI, has developed a first version of this architecture, called "IntelliGrid." It is publicly available, for free, on the Internet, through EPRI's website. It is a system of recommendations and databases of approximately 30,000 data cells of design information for system planners, suppliers, and others. The Intelligrid program is working closely with "GridWise" and other programs, including through common members, such as DOE, the California Energy Commission, and individual utilities.

These designs will be used increasingly as utilities here and abroad upgrade their systems. And EnerNOC's design concepts will prove to be at the leading edge of this new technology development and customer service paradigm. The build out of this architecture is just beginning with tremendous value in store for all stakeholders!

Read more about T.J. Glauthier's role at EnerNOC