A better solution to power shortages?

One of the worst aspects of our current way of handling high energy demand is that once the limit is reached, unilateral decisions on the part of the energy supplier are imposed on everyone. In a mid-July heat wave, as everyone in the midwest turns on their air conditioners, the supply gets severely stressed . . . and the closer to full capacity, the more likely that everyone will be inconvenienced by brown-outs or black-outs. Spencer Reiss looks at a co-operative solution: paying major users to cut back their demand until the supply/demand stabilizes:

Many utilities already do an ad-hoc version of this, an emergency practice known as demand response that has lately been promoted by Jon Wellinghoff, acting chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Now there's an alternative: Call EnerNOC, a Boston-based company that gangs commercial users who are willing, for a quarterly payment, to trim back operations on 30 minutes' notice. EnerNOC micromanages consumption at 3,400-plus locations from Maine to California. Between dimming lights, adjusting thermostats, and suspending industrial activities, the potential cuts top the output of a large nuclear reactor. And the savings can be huge.

The advantages should be clear: real-time (or almost real-time) ability to shift large blocks of energy usage out of peak demand times, benefitting both consumers and industrial energy users. The ability to co-operatively manage the overall demand rather than unilaterally cutting off users (and reducing the need for additional peak-only generation facilities) is clearly a better solution.