The most-cited family in this dataset is US20140265574A1, which covers managing energy demand and efficiency savings from voltage optimization using AMI-based data analysis, cited 62 times within the corpus. A related family, US9354641B2, extends this to planning energy demand and efficiency using the same AMI-based analysis approach. A representative later filing, US10734838B2, covers a practical conservation voltage reduction formulation using alarm signals from SCADA, RTU and smart meter devices. Anyone drafting claims in this area should review all three before finalising scope.

Ownership in this dataset is concentrated inside a single utility group, whose internal entities form the strongest co-assignee pairs recorded — stronger than any link between independent competitors. A major industrial electronics manufacturer also appears among the tracked assignees. None of the leading assignees, including the utility group and the electronics manufacturer, show any filings in the most recent tracked year, which is consistent with the overall flat-to-declining trend rather than a single company's retreat.

No — filings peaked at 4 in 2019 and had fallen to zero by the 2022 midpoint of the tracked period, indicating flat-to-declining activity rather than growth. Publication lag of roughly 18 months means the very latest years will always look thinner than they eventually turn out to be, so recent-year zeros should not be read as the field having stopped entirely. But the shape of the decline from a modest peak, rather than a spike followed by acceleration, points to a field where the core inventive ground was claimed early and has not been substantially reopened since.

In this dataset, the distinction shows up in the IPC composition: every one of the 81 families touches H02J (power supply and grid systems), but far fewer touch G06Q (business, commerce and data processing, 11 records). That split means most of the patented invention is in how voltage, current and load are sensed and actively regulated — G01R measurement and G05F/G05B control classifications — rather than in how the metering data itself is packaged, billed or analysed for commercial purposes. A pure data-analytics or billing-platform patent is less likely to read on this core group than a claim involving actual voltage or DER control logic.

The IPC composition shows thin coverage in a few adjacent branches relative to the H02J core: G01J (radiation and light measurement) and G05D (control of non-electric variables) each carry only a couple of records against 81 in H02J. DER dispatch coordinated directly through AMI telemetry, rather than through separate SCADA channels, also appears less densely claimed in this corpus than core voltage-reduction methods. Any of these branches is worth a targeted prior-art search before assuming freedom to operate, since low record counts in a focused search like this one can mean either genuine white space or simply that the search terms did not fully capture adjacent filings.