ADS Case Studies

Salt River Project: The Persistence of Customer Choice (published June 2012)

PowerCentsDC: A Model for Stakeholder Collaboration (published February 2011)


ADS Case Studies

The National Action Plan on Demand Response (NAP), published by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in June 2010, called for the development of case studies that would illustrate “lessons learned.”

Case Study Audience

The NAP called for the development and dissemination of case studies as an action to support demand response practitioners and policymakers. In developing its own plan, the Association for Demand Response and Smart Grid (ADS) deliberated over what kind of case study would be most useful to its target audiences of DR practitioners, smart grid technology and service providers, policymakers, and other stakeholders involved in demand response and smart grid activities. Consumers and the general public are not the intended audience of this paper.

The approach we have chosen includes interviewing relevant stakeholders and leveraging other published sources to collect varied perspectives (representative customers, consumer and/or environmental advocates, utility staff, regulators, and relevant technology or service providers and analysts) and present them in a way that would help others apply the practices to their own situations.

Case Study Structure and Uses

We hope these case studies will become the subjects of a series of articles, panels at industry conferences, and used in workshops emulating the business school case study process.

To complement the detailed reports and data analyses common in the industry, we chose a narrative style that allows the individuals involved in the program or project to “tell their story” and state the challenges that presented themselves.  We focus on questions:

• How did the key player(s) view the challenges?
• What happened? What processes were used to meet the challenges?
• What were the reactions and perspectives of different stakeholders?
• What worked, what didn’t work, what problems had to be overcome, what’s next?