Demand response has traditionally been viewed as a summer-only resource. But as extreme weather becomes more frequent, utilities increasingly need demand-side resources year-round. As a result, winter is emerging as a demand response season with its own distinct opportunities and challenges.
Summer demand response has become a familiar story: heat waves hit, air conditioning use spikes, and utilities activate demand response programs to reduce load during the hottest hours of the day. Cold weather events, however, introduce a different set of challenges that can’t be addressed by simply extending the summer playbook into winter. Device control strategies, event timing, and customer comfort considerations all require a fundamentally different approach.
Why Winter DR Presents a Distinct Challenge
Unlike summer’s predictable afternoon peaks driven by air conditioning, winter peaks vary more widely based on regional climate patterns, heating fuel sources, and time-of-day usage. Some utilities see morning peaks as people wake and turn up heat, while others experience evening surges when residents return home.
Temperature variations are also more extreme in winter, and a 20-degree swing can dramatically impact heating load. Since homes lose heat faster than they gain it, the preconditioning strategy that works for summer cooling needs to be adapted—often requiring longer preheating periods before events to maintain customer comfort.
Customer preference differs as well. People tend to be more sensitive to being too cold than too warm, making winter opt-out rates potentially higher if programs aren’t carefully designed. This makes customer experience and comfort optimization even more critical during winter events.
Ahead of winter 2025/26, Uplight has refined its approach to winter DR to account for these challenges:
- Longer preconditioning durations: Uplight discovered that homes need to be kept at warmer temperatures for longer periods to effectively “charge up” the thermal battery of the home in winter versus summer. Longer preconditioning durations during winter events help maintain customer comfort, reduce opt-outs, and deliver meaningful grid impact.
- Customizable DR approaches: Utilities can customize DR approaches to sub-groups based on seasonal patterns, geographic factors, or network topology to ensure utility dispatch strategies align with the local winter peak characteristics of their area, rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach.
Building a Year-Round DR Strategy with Predictive Capacity Dispatch
Uplight’s Predictive Capacity Dispatch (PCD) solution addresses reliability challenges that have historically limited DR’s value. Rather than applying blanket controls that lead to a gradual decline in performance as events progresses, PCD uses AI-driven forecasting to predict individual household responses with up to 98% accuracy. The platform segments customers into strategic groups and dispatches them in staggered waves, with each household participating for just one or two hours instead of the full event duration. This summer, PCD helped utilities deliver predictable capacity with a 3% prediction error forecasted 24 hours before event dispatch and less than 5% variability in per-hour load shift performance.
Winter presents a more challenging modeling environment than summer, with significantly greater variability in energy usage and more pronounced impacts from outdoor temperature during cold weather events. To address these challenges, Uplight re-architected the neural network and fine-tuned extreme weather model weights. These enhancements enable PCD to maintain its predictive accuracy and reliability even as winter weather creates more volatile load patterns.
The PCD feature is now launching with clients for the winter DR season, enabling utilities to improve demand response’s value with dependable performance and improved customer comfort and satisfaction.
With two-thirds of Uplight-administered programs now running through winter, the shift to year-round demand response is well underway. With the right technology and approach, demand response can be a firm capacity resource the grid can count on—every season of the year.
