How demand response can make the grid smarter, now

Most of you have heard the term "demand response" tossed around at some point or another over the past year. Just as many of you have probably wondered what relevance it could have for your business. In a nutshell, if you're already supporting some sort of power back-up contingency plan OR you have generators in place to run your data center in the case of an outage, you might be a great candidate for a demand response service. That's because you might actually be compensated for taking power off the grid.

Here's an item I wrote in my SmartPlanet blog that details what those benefits could be, based on my conversation with Telx, a New York-based data center operator supporting about 700 customers.