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Demand Response Manager

Event forecasting and dispatch

Enhances✓ Available Now

What You Do Today

Monitor weather forecasts, system load projections, and wholesale market prices to decide when to call DR events. Balance the need for load reduction against customer fatigue and contractual event limits.

AI That Applies

AI improves peak prediction accuracy by analyzing weather patterns, customer behavior trends, and real-time system conditions to recommend optimal event timing and duration.

Technologies

How It Works

For event forecasting and dispatch, the system draws on the relevant operational data and applies the appropriate analytical models. Predictive models decompose the historical pattern into trend, seasonal, and event-driven components, then project each forward while incorporating leading indicators from external data. The output — optimal event timing and duration — surfaces in the existing workflow where the practitioner can review and act on it.

What Changes

Event dispatch decisions shift from conservative fixed triggers to AI-optimized timing that maximizes load reduction while minimizing unnecessary events.

What Stays

The final go/no-go decision — calling a DR event affects thousands of customers and requires human judgment about weather uncertainty, system conditions, and program sustainability.

What To Do Next

This section won't tell you what your numbers should be. It will show you how to find them yourself. Every instruction below produces a real, verifiable result in your organization. No benchmarks, no projections — just the steps to build your own evidence.

1

Establish Your Baseline

Know where you are before you move

Before adopting AI tools for event forecasting and dispatch, understand your current state.

Map your current process: Document how event forecasting and dispatch works today — who does what, how long it takes, where the bottlenecks are. You need this baseline to measure improvement.
Identify the judgment points: The final go/no-go decision — calling a DR event affects thousands of customers and requires human judgment about weather uncertainty, system conditions, and program sustainability. These are the boundaries AI won't cross.
Assess your data readiness: AI tools for this area need data to work. Check whether your organization has the historical data, integrations, and data quality to support DERMS tools.

Without a baseline, you can't measure whether AI actually improved anything. You'll adopt tools without knowing if they're working.

2

Define Your Measures

What to track and how to calculate it

Time per cycle

How to calculate

Measure how long event forecasting and dispatch takes end-to-end today, then after AI adoption.

Why it matters

The most visible improvement is speed. If AI doesn't save time, question whether it's adding value.

Quality of output

How to calculate

Track error rates, rework frequency, or stakeholder satisfaction scores before and after.

Why it matters

Speed without quality is just faster mistakes. Measure both.

When to check: Check after 30 days of consistent use, then quarterly.
The commitment: Give new tools at least 30 days before judging. The first week is always awkward.
What NOT to measure: Don't measure AI adoption rate as a KPI. Adoption follows value — if the tool helps, people use it.
3

Start These Conversations

Who to talk to and what to ask

your VP Operations or COO

What's the current accuracy of our forecasting, and how would we know if an AI model is actually better?

They're prioritizing which operational processes to automate

your process improvement or lean lead

Which historical data do we have that's clean enough to train a prediction model on?

They understand the workflow dependencies that AI tools need to respect

4

Check Your Prerequisites

Confirm readiness before you invest

Check items as you confirm them.