Demand Flex is Having Its Moment: Thoughts from Flex Summit 2026

Latitude Media held its inaugural Flex Summit last week in Austin, Texas. Edo’s Chief Commercial Officer Emilie Bolduc and Utility Sales Director Dee Martir were in attendance. They said the temperature was high, but enthusiasm for demand flexibility was arguably higher. From the onstage conversations to discussions between sessions, here are some of their key takeaways.

The conversation is shifting toward scale

Data centers are driving gigawatts of unprecedented load growth. The virtual power plant (VPP) market is maturing with expanding business models. These developments have shifted the conversation from whether flexibility has value to how we can actually scale it.

Summit discussions highlighted both the opportunities to expand flexibility and the work needed to make it happen.

• Utilities are actively looking for their next flexible megawatts.
  They aren’t just talking about demand response, but exploring new programs, new customer segments, and new ways to unlock capacity from existing loads.
• Much of the flexibility we need is already out there.
  Many devices already installed in homes, including residential batteries, could support the grid but aren’t enrolled in VPP programs. A recent Brattle Group report cited during the summit estimates that expanding residential VPP capacity from 10 GW to 35 GW could deliver $4 billion to $7 billion annually in financial benefits for U.S. households. That growth could come primarily from enrolling and activating existing devices.
• Energy efficiency and demand flexibility need to stop operating in silos.
  There’s an opportunity to build on existing efficiency programs, customer relationships, and building infrastructure to deliver both permanent energy savings and dispatchable capacity.
• Flexibility must become easier to access, accurately valued, and more dependable.
  Finding flexible load is only part of the challenge. We also need to make it easier to enroll, measure, and dispatch, while developing better ways to quantify and compensate for the value it delivers to the grid.

Who will pay for flexibility?

Scaling flexibility also means answering a commercial question: Who will pay for it, and what will they expect in return?

In one session, Jigar Shah raised this very point, challenging us to think about the market structures that would allow flexibility to compete with traditional infrastructure investments. With data centers scrambling for power, flexibility has become a hot commodity, and he suggested that hyperscalers could become some of its biggest buyers.

But here’s what we’re still trying to unpack:

• Are hyperscalers contracting directly with flexibility providers, paying utilities to procure it, or pursuing something else entirely?
• What exactly are they buying? Is it guaranteed load reduction, the ability to connect to the grid sooner, or some combination of the two?

Using flexibility to help connect new large loads raises further questions for utilities and grid operators, as well as the regulators and policymakers shaping the rules:

• Can we make flexible load dependable enough for utilities and grid operators to count on when making firm capacity commitments?
• If so, how do we structure, value, and compensate for that flexibility?

Turning interest into scale

For those of us who’ve been working in demand flexibility for years, it’s exciting to see the conversation shift from whether flexibility has a role to just how significant that role could become. But recognizing that value and scaling it are two very different things. We need to make flexibility easier for customers to participate in, more predictable for utilities and grid operators to rely on, and more straightforward to procure and compensate. That means figuring out not just who will pay for flexibility, but what they’re buying, how we measure its value, and how we create the commercial structures that make it viable at scale.