When you use electricity is becoming a priced asset.

The IEA’s Electricity 2026 report puts a figure on a resource most companies do not know they hold. As of 2024, in the report’s own wording, “only around 100 GW of demand response is utilised on a global basis”: roughly 75 GW in industry, around 30 GW in buildings, under 5 GW in transport. Aluminium production alone accounts for around 160 GW of peak demand.

Two rule changes have begun to alter that. Since 30 September 2025 the EU day-ahead market clears in fifteen-minute rather than hourly intervals, so prices track short-run conditions instead of averaging them away. Since 1 January 2026, under the Swiss Mantelerlass, the flexibility of an installation belongs to whoever owns it, and anyone wishing to use it must acquire that use by contract.

The Swiss change is the more consequential, and it carries a deadline this autumn.

Flexibility now has a legal owner, and using it requires a contract

Article 17c(1) of the Federal Electricity Supply Act, in this version since 1 January 2026, is direct: end consumers, producers and storage operators hold the flexibility made usable by the controllability of offtake, storage or feed-in, and whoever wants to use it acquires that use by contract.

Distribution system operators may use it in their own grid area for grid-serving purposes, through non-discriminatory contracts that include remuneration (Art. 17c(2)). Art. 19a of the Electricity Supply Ordinance defines grid-serving narrowly: relieving a strained local grid situation, avoiding grid expansion, deferring grid measures, or reducing network costs in that area.

The ordinance also fixes the contract’s minimum contents, which double as a negotiating checklist: the control system, the scope of planned use, the reporting arrangements, the remuneration, the duration and the termination terms (Art. 19b(1)). Operators must publish those remuneration rates annually (Art. 19b(2)). The remuneration has a funding route: under Art. 13abis, the costs of control systems used for grid-serving flexibility, remuneration included, are allowable network costs.

Two uses sit outside any negotiation. Under Art. 17c(4) and (5), operators keep guaranteed use for curtailing feed-in at the connection point, capped by Art. 19c(4) at 3% of the energy generated there annually, and for immediate significant threats to secure grid operation — against the holder’s will and unremunerated (Art. 19c(1)).

A letter sent in January 2026 set the default, and silence counted as consent

Most Swiss sites already have flexibility in use, though rarely under that name. ElCom cites the ordinary cases: boilers heated at night by ripple control, heat pumps interrupted at defined times. Art. 19d(1) calls this existing flexibility — what an operator was already using through a control system before 1 January 2026.

The legislator let operators keep it, on conditions. They must inform the holder annually and in writing about the first four of those elements, from the control system through to the remuneration, and about the consequences of a prohibition (Art. 19d(2)). ElCom specifies that the first notice had to go by letter post between 1 and 31 January 2026, and that the operator must state that an absence of reaction constitutes tacit acceptance. St.Gallen’s city utility put the choice to its customers on 16 January 2026: take control yourself, which requires an electrician to alter the installation, or leave it with the utility and keep the attached tariff benefit.

The holder may forbid continued use, in writing, either within thirty days of receiving the information or with three months’ notice to the end of a calendar year (Art. 19d(3)); ElCom reads that written form as requiring letter post and an explicit refusal. It also sets out what a missed window means: where the thirty days lapsed unused, continued use can only be prohibited from 1 January 2027, and the letter must be sent by the end of September 2026 at the latest. Because no rule allocates the burden of proof, ElCom recommends registered post.

The effect runs one way, within limits. On ElCom’s reading a prohibition definitively extinguishes the operator’s pre-emptive right, and any new use must be governed by a contract under Art. 19b. Guaranteed uses are unaffected, and Art. 19d(4) gives no claim to removal of a control system already installed.

The price signal has become finer, and the meter now has its own line on the bill

The European change is structural. The Commission dates the move to quarter-hourly day-ahead prices to 30 September 2025 and traces it to the Electricity Regulation (EU) 2019/943, not to the 2024 reform; such a price follows ramps that an hourly average conceals. The 2024 reform, in force since 16 July 2024, works on a longer horizon: each member state must periodically assess its flexibility needs and set an indicative national objective for non-fossil flexibility, with a stated contribution from demand response.

Prices are falling, which is when structure matters more than level. Eurostat, in data extracted in April 2026, puts the EU average non-household price at EUR 0.1837 per kWh in the second half of 2025, down 5.4% year on year, with national levels ranging from EUR 0.0748 in Finland to EUR 0.2552 in Ireland.

Swiss figures point the same way. ElCom announced on 9 September 2025 that the median household tariff for 2026 would fall about 4% to 27.7 Rp./kWh, with metering costs itemised separately at a median of CHF 74.40 a year; for commercial customers, energy prices fall and network costs including metering decline slightly, unlike for households. Article 14(3) sets the direction: network tariffs must reflect the costs end consumers cause, orient themselves on the offtake profile, and set incentives for stable and secure grid operation.

One threshold sorts the options. Under Art. 6(2), fixed end consumers are households and other end consumers whose annual consumption per site is below 100 MWh; at or above that level a site may exercise its right of grid access and choose its supplier.

Congestion has a price, and flexibility is becoming a competitive supply

The cost of not moving demand is measurable. In a December 2025 report on demand flexibility, the IEA puts grid congestion at almost USD 8 billion in the United States and USD 4.5 billion in the European Union in 2024, renewable curtailment above 10 TWh in the EU, and notes that flexibility can deliver capacity at up to three times lower cost than building new capacity.

The supply side is also moving: utility-scale battery project costs fell about 40% in 2024 to around USD 150 per kWh, with 63 GW added and 124 GW installed worldwide. Flexibility is being supplied competitively, from batteries as well as from processes.

What a management team can settle this quarter

Little of the regulatory design is negotiable. The following is.

• Find the January 2026 letter and read what it grants. If it does not name the control system, the scope of use, the reporting arrangements and the remuneration, Art. 19d(2) has not been satisfied.
• Decide before the end of September 2026. Keeping the arrangement is legitimate where the tariff benefit is real; reclaiming control requires a registered letter before that date, effective 1 January 2027.
• Ask for the remuneration rates that Art. 19b(2) obliges the operator to publish annually, and compare them before signing.
• Map the loads that tolerate a two-hour shift, then sub-meter them. Cold storage, compressors, heat treatment, batch processes, vehicle charging and ventilation are the usual candidates; without measurement at that level, no shift can be verified or invoiced.
• Check consumption per site against the 100 MWh threshold, which decides whether the site may choose its supplier at all.

The dates that will carry information

The end of September 2026 is the last date for a prohibition taking effect on 1 January 2027, and each annual notice thereafter reopens a thirty-day window, so the decision returns every year rather than expiring. Under Art. 17c(3), if operator access is found to be holding back other uses of flexibility, the Federal Council may impose measures at the operators’ expense, and reports annually.

None of this obliges a company to change how it operates. It does mean that the timing of consumption is now a position a firm holds: an owner named in law, a contract form set in ordinance, a date by which the default is confirmed or withdrawn. The question for a board is narrow — which processes could move by two hours without a customer noticing.