On August 5, 2025, Codibly hosted a webinar unpacking one of the hardest questions facing anyone building demand response products for the United States: how do you navigate a market shaped at once by federal mandates, divergent state-level policies, and competing technical protocols? The session offered a practical map of the US demand response landscape and where the real opportunities sit for technology providers, utilities, and aggregators.

Spencer Borison, US President at Codibly, was joined by renewable energy expert Leah McGovern to translate a patchwork of regulation into a clear view of what matters — and what to build for first.

Webinar highlights

1. Federal and state forces pulling in different directions
Demand response in the US is governed at two levels at once: federal rules such as FERC Order 2222 open wholesale markets to distributed resources, while individual states set their own interconnection and participation rules. Success means reading both layers together.

2. The protocols that actually shape the grid
The session decoded the standards that matter for participation — IEEE 1547 for interconnection, IEEE 2030.5 for DER communication, and OpenADR for demand response signaling — and where each is being adopted.

3. A genuine state-by-state patchwork
California, Texas, Colorado, Illinois and others are adopting different combinations of standards on different timelines. A product built for one state’s requirements rarely transfers cleanly to the next.

4. FERC Order 2222 as a market-access catalyst
By requiring grid operators to let aggregated DERs compete in wholesale markets, FERC 2222 reframes demand response from a utility program into a revenue opportunity — but only for providers whose technology can meet the technical bar.

5. Where the opportunity sits for technology providers
The complexity is the opportunity: vendors who can abstract away protocol and jurisdictional fragmentation for utilities and aggregators are positioned to win as more states formalize their DER rules.

Watch the full webinar below:

Looking ahead

Expect the patchwork to keep expanding rather than converge. As more states move to mandate IEEE 1547, IEEE 2030.5, and OpenADR, the providers who design for a multi-jurisdiction, multi-protocol reality from day one — rather than retrofitting later — will have the clearest path to scale across the US market.