PJM Activates Demand Response as High Power Load Hits Mid-Atlantic, Midwest

Demand response is doing exactly the job it was built for: paying large power users to step back so the grid can hold, which is a reminder that electricity is becoming a dispatchable, price-sensitive commodity rather than a fixed input. For data-center operators, industrial loads and the miners competing for the same interconnection queue, this is the constraint that matters more than any single supply deal — the grid, not the chip, sets the pace. Whether these curtailment calls stay episodic or become a routine feature of peak load is the open question.