Utilities won't share smart-meter data, and demand response is paying for it

Utilities won't share smart-meter data, and demand response is paying for it Voltus signed up 20,000 ComEd customers for demand response; only about 4% cleared the utility's enrollment, exposing a data-access bottleneck across PJM. Voltus signed up about 20,000 Commonwealth Edison customers for its demand-response programs. Only about 4% of them made it through the Chicago utility's enrollment process, Canary Media reported on Thursday (2026-06-04). The rest were lost in the handoff.³ That matters because the bottleneck sits between a willing customer and a dispatchable megawatt. Demand response pays households and businesses to cut consumption when the grid is tight, and getting signed up is the first step. If 96% of a 20,000-name book never clears that step, the load reduction the market is counting on simply does not exist.³ The choke point is data. A technology standard called CORE is supposed to let utilities pass smart-meter data electronically to customers and the third parties they authorize. As actually implemented, it has made signing up impractical, Voltus and Mission:data told Canary Media. The standard works on paper; the execution does not.³ Smart-meter access is not a nicety here. Without a customer's interval data, an aggregator cannot model the load, prove a curtailment happened, or settle the payment owed for it. The report behind the complaint argues the demand-side portfolio can grow on better customer experience and sharper modeling rather than new hardware.³ The framing is deliberately about PJM, not just Illinois. Voltus and Mission:data are presenting ComEd as one instance of a wider pattern across the region, where utilities hold the keys to the data that aggregators need to build a demand-side book.³ The timing is awkward, because money is pouring into the supply side of the same demand. Capital is rotating into companies that can feed AI data-center buildouts, and Fluence Energy showed the appetite when its shares jumped 98.2% in a single week to close at $24.16 on May 8, 2026, after disclosing master supply agreements with two hyperscalers and a record $5.6 billion backlog.² The driver behind both stories is the same load. Data-center construction is pulling investors toward anything that can supply power, with nuclear and renewable baseload pitched as the cleanest options. Demand response works the other end of the meter, trimming peaks instead of building plants, which is what makes a 96% enrollment failure more than a customer-service footnote.^2,3 Fluence is still a turnaround story. The stock is down roughly 39% so far in 2026, a micro-cap worth around $3.2 billion, though it posted positive adjusted EBITDA of $2.0 million in the first quarter of 2026, a fourth straight quarter in the black, with non-GAAP gross margin of 52%. The market is paying up for hardware backlogs.^2,1 Set the two against each other and the asymmetry is clear. New batteries and generation win headline backlogs and a doubling share price, while the cheaper lever, paying existing customers to use less at peak, stalls on a data handoff that utilities control. One is a financing question. The other is administrative, and on its face easier to fix.^2,3 What to watch is whether regulators treat the ComEd case as a one-off or a template. The complaint names a specific failure at a specific utility, which is harder to dismiss than a broad grievance. If the same CORE implementation repeats across PJM, aggregators will keep enrolling customers they cannot dispatch, and the demand-side megawatts the grid needs will go uncounted while utilities pay to build new supply.^3,2