Automated Demand Response Patents: Leaders & Filing Trends 2026
Filing growth compares 2021 (177 records) with 2024 (186) — a three-year span. 2024 is the most recent year we treat as complete: publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 onwards are still filling in and any growth rate that ends there would understate the field. Top-5 share is the combined record count of the five largest assignees divided by all 3,773 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What the automated demand response patent record shows
Automated demand response covers the systems that let a grid operator or aggregator signal a load event and have connected devices — building automation controllers, appliances, industrial equipment — respond without a human in the loop. The 3,773 records captured here span 2015 through the 2026 cut-off and reflect filings from utilities, industrial automation vendors, cloud platforms and financial-market infrastructure players alike, a mix that itself tells you this is no longer a narrow utility-engineering niche. Publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so the most recent one to two years in any trend chart will always look thinner than the underlying filing activity actually was.
The assignee ranking is broad rather than tight: the leader holds 87 records, but the field's largest players together account for a modest slice of the whole. That pattern points to a technology still being claimed from many directions — software orchestration, grid control, AI-driven forecasting and communications protocols — rather than one already staked out by a small group of incumbents.
Filing trends and technology composition
Two views of the same 3,773-record corpus: how filing activity has moved year over year, and which IPC subclasses carry the claims. Because a single record can sit in more than one class, the class shares below add up to well over 100% — that is expected, not an error.
Filing trend, 2017–2026
Annual filings moved from 126 records in 2017 to 134 in 2026, with the field growing 5% between 2021 (177) and 2024 (186) — the last year the count can be treated as essentially complete. 2025's apparent peak of 283 and the 2026 figure are still filling in as later publications land, so read the last two years as a floor, not a ceiling.
Technology composition by IPC subclass
G06Q (business, commerce & admin data processing) leads at 37.1% of the 3,773 records, with G06F (electric digital data processing) close behind at 27.7%. The hardware and control classes — H02J grid systems at 7.4% and G05B control systems at 7.6% — sit well below the software-oriented classes, and AI-specific claims under G06N reach 9.1%, a signal that the forecasting and optimisation layer is now a distinct claim target rather than an afterthought inside broader control patents.
Shares are the percentage of the 3,773 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
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Try EurekaA representative automated demand response patent
Automated demand response scheduling to reduce electrical loads (US9310786B2)
A system and method for reducing an electrical load in a facility with a building automation system, includes first receiving information for a demand response event from an automated demand response server at an automated demand response client. After receipt of a new demand response event, the system determines a plurality of devices of the building automation system to be controlled during the demand response event. Next, the system prepares a schedule of control actions for the plurality of devices during the demand response event. The system then sends control messages to the building automation system to execute the control actions for the plurality of devices according to the schedule.Filed by Siemens Industry Inc., granted 2016-04-12 — a claim built squarely on the server-to-client scheduling architecture that dominates this field's software layer.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US20030229900A1 | Method and apparatus for browsing using multiple coordinated device sets | 3,475 |
| 2 | US20170235848A1 | System and method for fuzzy concept mapping, voting ontology crowd sourcing, and technology prediction | 1,473 |
| 3 | US6088686A | System and method to performing on-line credit reviews and approvals | 1,250 |
| 4 | US20090265193A1 | Methods and systems for automated property insurance inspection | 1,243 |
| 5 | US20140129942A1 | System and method for dynamically providing visual action or activity news feed | 1,212 |
| 6 | US6658526B2 | Network attached virtual data storage subsystem | 1,058 |
| 7 | US20100324962A1 | Smart building manager | 954 |
| 8 | US6609113B1 | Method and system for processing internet payments using the electronic funds transfer network | 905 |
| 9 | US5956693A | Computer system for merchant communication to customers | 826 |
| 10 | US20080077336A1 | Power line universal monitor | 765 |
Citation counts reward older, more widely searched records and should be read as a signal of influence within this corpus, not as a measure of which patents matter most today.
Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Browse MCP servers →What the concentration and citation data indicate
The ranking, the class split and the citation table each point to a different aspect of how this field has developed since 2015.
The top of the ranking is thin, not dominant
The five most active assignees together hold 246 records — 6.5% of everything in scope — and the ten most active hold 10.0%. That is a long tail: most of the field's claim space is held by single-digit filers rather than a handful of repeat players.
Steady, not explosive, growth through the last complete year
Filing moved from 177 records in 2021 to 186 in 2024, a measured 5% rise over three years. Treat 2025 and 2026 figures as still filling in given the roughly 18-month publication lag, rather than reading them as a slowdown or a spike.
The software layer is far more crowded than the grid-hardware layer
G06Q business-process claims cover 37.1% of records versus 7.4% for H02J power-supply and grid-systems claims. Filing into pure grid-control hardware sits on comparatively open ground next to the densely claimed scheduling and business-logic layer.
Filing is US-led but genuinely international
The United States receives the largest single share of filings at 1,565 records, with India (521), the WIPO PCT route (463) and the EPO (339) each carrying meaningful volume. That spread suggests the technology is being protected across multiple regulatory grid environments rather than treated as a single-market concern.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to demand response & flexible loads: automated demand response patent landscape, with the prior art for and against each one.
Where to take this analysis
The figures above establish the shape of the field. Turning that into a filing or freedom-to-operate decision means going deeper on specific claim sets and specific assignees.
Map claims against a specific product architecture
Run a candidate system design against the dense G06Q and G06F claim clusters to see which elements are already occupied and which sit in the thinner H02J and G05B hardware classes.
Open Eureka →Track the assignees building a portfolio, not a single filing
A handful of names in the ranking file repeatedly across years; watching their continuation and follow-on filings shows where they intend to hold ground rather than test an idea once.
Explore assignee activity →Revisit AI-forecasting claims as G06N volume grows
At 9.1% of records, AI-model claims are still a minority share but growing as a distinct category — worth a dedicated search rather than folding it into general control-systems review.
Search Eureka →Common questions on automated demand response patents
The dataset behind this landscape contains 3,773 published records filed between 2015 and the 2026 data cut-off. Filing activity has grown modestly rather than explosively — from 177 records in 2021 to 186 in 2024, a 5% rise over that span, which is the most recent period the data can be treated as complete. Later years understate true filing volume because publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, so 2025 and 2026 counts will keep rising as more records surface.
The ranking is a long tail rather than a tight oligopoly: the single most active assignee holds 87 records, and the five most active together account for only 6.5% of all 3,773 records in scope. The ten most active combined reach 10.0% of the total. That spread indicates the field is being claimed by a wide mix of players — industrial automation vendors, cloud and software companies, and financial-infrastructure firms — rather than being locked up by a small incumbent group.
The largest single claim area is G06Q, business and commerce data processing, covering 37.1% of the 3,773 records, followed by G06F general digital data processing at 27.7%. Communications (H04L, 14.4%) and AI-model computing (G06N, 9.1%) are meaningful but smaller categories, while grid-hardware classes like H02J power supply and grid systems (7.4%) and G05B control systems (7.6%) carry noticeably less claim density. That imbalance suggests the orchestration and scheduling software around demand response is more heavily claimed than the grid-side hardware that executes it.
Relative to the crowded G06Q and G06F software classes, the H02J power-supply and grid-systems class at 7.4% and the G05B control-systems class at 7.6% carry far fewer records, despite being essential to any real deployment. This does not mean those areas are unclaimed, but the claim density is markedly lower, which is where a freedom-to-operate search is more likely to find room rather than dense prior art. AI-forecasting claims under G06N, at 9.1%, are also still a smaller category worth checking as a distinct search rather than assuming coverage under general control-systems patents.
US9310786B2, filed by Siemens Industry Inc. and granted in 2016, claims a server-to-client architecture in which an automated demand response server sends event information to a client that then schedules and executes control actions across multiple building-automation devices. It is a representative example of the server-orchestrated scheduling model that appears throughout the G06Q and G06F claim clusters in this dataset, rather than a singular blocking patent. Anyone building a similar client-server demand response scheduler should review its specific claim language on device selection and schedule preparation, since that is the mechanism most likely to overlap with a new design.
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Disclaimer. This page is generated from Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent and scientific-literature records, and is provided for general information and reference only.
Patent data carries inherent limitations: recent filings (typically the most recent 18–24 months) are under-counted due to standard publication lag; counts may be reported at either a patent-family or a patent-record basis and are not always directly comparable; classification, applicant-name, and citation data may contain errors, duplicates, or omissions; and the underlying search query defines and constrains the scope shown. As a result, the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing on this page constitutes an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate, or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial, investment, or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any patent, commercial, or strategic decision should be verified independently and reviewed with qualified patent, legal, and domain professionals. Patsnap makes no warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the information presented.
Machine translation. Assignee and organisation names originally recorded in Chinese, Japanese or Korean have been rendered into English by an AI translation step so that the tables stay readable. These renderings are best-effort and may not match a company’s registered English name; the original name is what the underlying patent record carries, and it is what any Eureka query launched from this page uses.