Who is the grid for?

Grid regulators are so focused on cleaning up fake demand they are ignoring real demand.

Spotify surveyed its customers to gauge sentiment about AI-generated music. Based on the results, the music streaming platform signed an agreement with Universal Music Group to allow paid subscribers to remix, chop, and change licensed music and create new music with AI. 

Thousands of new songs are being created just in the beta release of this new Spotify feature, including a synth pop version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Spotify astutely created a business model to benefit itself, music labels and the artists, but the product only exists because hundreds of millions of customers demanded it. Apparently, despite the loud resistance to AI-slop, what people want is to create their own music based on derivations of their favorite songs. Decades of music control by corporations have been upended by streaming and AI. Markets eventually reorganize around the end user even when incumbents and platforms would rather preserve the old or prevailing order.

The electricity industry is having its own Spotify moment.

For decades, the U.S. electricity grids have been governed from the top down. Generation, transmission, wholesale markets, reliability rules, and then customers were the order of consideration. Demand, even from the largest commercial customers, was passive, and cost recovery could be socialized after the fact. The grid has always treated electricity demand as an engineering problem.