Electricity bills are climbing. Extreme weather is also pushing the grid harder during a small number of peak hours, when costs spike and capacity is tight. In those moments, typical demand response programs often ask households to sacrifice comfort.
That approach hits a wall. Participation stalls when it disrupts daily life.
A better path is comfort-first flexibility: subtle adjustments households barely notice, like pre-cooling ahead of peaks. As homes electrify, the same approach can maintain participation while expanding the value delivered.
If homes help ease peak demand, households should see value in return. The question is how to scale the benefits without asking customers to manage the complexity.
Traditional residential demand response has a ceiling
Conventional residential demand response programs have real value and will keep playing an important role. But many programs struggle to grow enrollment beyond roughly 10–20% of eligible smart-thermostat users.¹ If participation requires noticeable comfort impacts, repeated attention, or confusing choices, enrollment tends to taper after early adopters.
If the grid wants reliable peak relief at scale, it needs a more user-centric model that works for the remaining 80–90%. It’s already working: Renew Home has more than 5 million households enrolled, adding up to nearly 4 GW of flexible capacity.²
The path past the ceiling is simple: keep comfort and control intact, let shifts adapt to real household behavior, and ensure households benefit from the value they help create.
A comfort-first approach to household flexibility
Energy Shift started with a simple idea: respond to grid signals so households could help the grid without changing routines. As adoption expanded, that same comfort-first approach began to deliver measurable peak relief, too.
Energy Shift uses signals like weather, rate and peak windows, grid conditions, and learned patterns to deliver personalized shifts. We won’t get it right every time. People adjust their thermostat for all kinds of reasons, and that’s fine. Overriding any adjustment is as simple as turning the dial. When it happens, we treat it as feedback and aim to do better next time.
Across the home, the principle is the same: support everyday life first, and let flexibility happen in the background, with plain-language explanations of “why” when it does.
Customer value: Easing bill pressure and sharing grid value back
For customers on time-varying rates, shifting can reduce the bill even when total energy use stays the same. In California, Energy Shift delivered an average of about $35 in summer bill savings for households on time-of-use rates, on top of the savings features already built into Nest thermostats.³
In that same TOU cohort, eligible households who linked their utility account to enable summer cooling offsets for peak reduction received an additional $15 reward.⁴
That pairing matters because the same flexibility that reduces peak strain can also reduce peak-driven costs. And because the value is created in homes, a user-centric model should return a meaningful share of that value to the households providing it.
Energy Shift Capacity: A grid resource you can plan around
Even across thousands of homes, comfort-first shifting can add up to meaningful peak demand reduction. As adoption expanded, Energy Shift evolved into what we now call Energy Shift Capacity: verified peak demand reduction from aggregated homes during defined event windows, using our standard measurement and verification (M&V) method, reliable enough for energy providers to plan around during peak periods.
Now the focus is proving, through real-world measurement at scale, that this approach is the most reliable way to turn household participation into a grid resource and share meaningful value back with homes.
Proof it shows up during the hardest hour
In July 2025, we ran Energy Shifts in the PJM Interconnection, activating about half of the 1.1 million participating thermostats (approximately 640,000 devices). On July 29, those shifts produced an estimated peak load reduction of about 380 megawatts from 5 to 6pm, using our standard measurement and verification (M&V) method and a large randomized controlled trial (RCT) design with thermostat telemetry.⁵
That’s the point: when shifts don’t disrupt comfort, participation stays high enough to produce grid-scale peak relief.
Whole-home coordination is the next unlock
Thermostats are the start. As EVs, batteries, and solar get added, flexibility should stay simple: customers opt in once and the home handles the tradeoffs, without a new program to manage for every device.
If a customer already trusts a program on their thermostat, connecting the next device shouldn’t feel like starting over. It should feel like adding another way their home can help during the hours that matter, and another way they can lower their energy costs. That’s how participation becomes a flywheel: one device builds trust, and the next device expands the value.
Value should flow back to homes
Energy Shift Capacity is available now. It doesn’t require recruiting new households, and it can reduce demand during the hours that matter most. This resource is already built and connected at scale.
If we want this grid resource to keep growing, the value it creates should not stop at the grid edge. Homes create the value, and some of it should flow back to them.
This is partner content, brought to you by Renew Home. Read more in Renew Home’s white paper, Scaling Residential Demand Response by Prioritizing Comfort: Evidence from 25 Million Energy Shifts.
1. Renew Home, “The power of personalization: There’s big power in small changes,” White paper, Renew Home, LLC, March. 2025, p. 4. [Online]. Available: https://www.renewhome.com/resources/position-papers/the-power-of-personalization
2. M. Blasnik, D. Reid, and S. Lanzisera, “Scaling residential demand response by prioritizing comfort: Evidence from 25 million energy shifts,” White paper, Renew Home, LLC, Nov. 2025, p. 16. [Online]. Available: https://www.renewhome.com/resources/white-papers/scaling-residential-demand-response
3. Estimate based on a summer 2025 cooling season analysis of Nest Renew California TOU users that compared air conditioning runtime of TOU vs non-TOU users in the same postal code, assumed a 2.5 kW system size, a weighted average of common California TOU rates, and an average of 1.2 thermostats per household. The average cooling season savings estimate was $38.71. See ibid., 2.
4. Ibid., 2.
5. Ibid., 17.
