A large customer’s agreement to limit or shift part of its load when the grid calls, offered in return for a faster connection. Curtailment is the same cut seen from the grid’s side. Chapter 6.
From The AI Compute Race. Read the book
Where the book uses it
- Chapter 6 — Firm, Around-the-Clock
Where the electricity comes from: grid queues, transformers, turbines and the firm power a datacenter needs every hour of the year, on calendars the buildout does not control.
Also discussed in
- Dated test Chapter 6, firm service is the constraint
Sources that use it
- Google, “Demand response data center milestone,” 19 March 2026 (“We’ve now integrated a total of 1 gigawatt (GW) of demand response capacity into our long-term energy contracts with multiple utilities across the U.S.”; the contracts named: Indiana Michigan Power and the Tennessee Valley Authority “last year”, then Entergy Arkansas, Minnesota Power and DTE Energy; “There are limits to how flexible a given data center can be, and this capability will only be available at certain locations”; the post’s text names no site and reports no megawatt called; the contracts “incorporate demand response as a key resource for new data centers to connect more rapidly to local grids”; the mechanism: “Google’s demand response capability allows us to limit or shift a portion of machine learning (ML) workloads running in our data centers”; “Demand response can be deployed quickly to bridge the gap between short-term load growth and the longer timelines required to build new clean generation and storage solutions”). In the Sources
Related terms
From the glossary of The AI Compute Race.
How to cite this page
Dryburgh, Lee S. “Demand response.” In The AI Compute Race. DRYBURGH. https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/demand-response (accessed 2026-11-01).
BibTeX
@misc{dryburgh-demand-response-2026,
author = {Dryburgh, Lee S.},
title = {{Demand response}},
howpublished = {In \emph{The AI Compute Race}, DRYBURGH},
year = {2026},
url = {https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/demand-response},
note = {Accessed 2026-11-01}
}