The business of demand response — cutting energy use to reduce peak grid demands — has evolved with the growing capability of technologies to enable it over the decades, from the manual emergency load-shedding of the past to the modern incarnation of virtual power plants, which coordinate digitally connected devices to shift loads across thousands of sites in close to real time. But the structures for valuing the “negawatts” that demand response delivers have largely remained the same. One is utility programs that pay customers ahead of time to reduce load under preset conditions and with preset payments, with little flexibility outside the program rules.