What is a demand response system?

Gotta love the Wikipedia, which says:

In electricity grids, demand response (DR) refers to mechanisms to manage the demand from customers in response to supply conditions, for example, having electricity customers reduce their consumption at critical times or in response to market prices.

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It’d be like you or me ensuring that we’ve pro-actively raised the temp on our home thermostat during the portion of the day we’re not home so as to reduce our demand for electricity to run the a/c.

The idea is that the source of demand (for electricity utilities, that would be you and me) will proactively respond by decreasing our demand at times of peak usage.

In the link I provided above, there’s a section entitled Technologies for demand reduction where they talk a little bit about the kinds of things you might deploy in your home as part of an automated system. For example, during periods of peak load, the electric utility might send a signal to a DR device that you installed on your a/c unit to turn it off.