Not currently, based on this dataset. Filings peaked in 2019 at 41 families and had fallen to 14 by the 2022 midpoint, a flat-to-declining trajectory rather than continued growth. Publication lag of roughly 18 months means the very latest years in any trend chart understate true activity, but the multi-year decline predates that lag effect. Anyone entering now is filing into a plateaued field with an established prior-art base rather than an emerging one.

The 874 tracked families split fairly evenly between grid hardware control (H02J, 366 records) and business or administrative logic such as customer enrollment and incentive calculation (G06Q, 327 records). Supporting subclasses include general digital processing (G06F), control and regulating systems (G05B and G05D), HVAC-specific applications (F24F), communications (H04L), and measurement (G01R). A search or drafting strategy that only covers hardware control claims will miss a substantial share of relevant prior art sitting in the business-logic subclasses.

The United States, by a wide margin. Of the tracked records, 353 were filed at the USPTO, compared with 126 at the EPO, 78 through WIPO's PCT route, 72 in Canada, 50 in Australia and 46 in China. This concentration suggests that competitive monitoring, licensing negotiations and opposition strategy in this field should weight US prosecution activity most heavily, while treating the other jurisdictions as secondary but still relevant markets.

Assignees named in recent-year momentum tracking include General Electric, Google, Comverge, Honeywell, Fujitsu and Toyota, though notably all six show zero filings in the most recent tracked year. Comverge stands out for co-filing activity, appearing in the dataset's strongest co-assignee pairs alongside Landis+Gyr entities and inventor Joseph W. Forbes Jr. No single assignee currently shows accelerating momentum, which points to a field where leadership is more distributed than concentrated at the top.

Relative to the dense H02J and G06Q core, subclasses like F24F (HVAC-specific load curtailment), G01R (measurement and two-way metering protocols), H04L (communication-layer signaling for load events) and G05D (non-electric variable control integration) carry noticeably fewer records. That lower density does not guarantee an easy path to grant, but it does suggest these adjacent branches warrant a closer prior-art read before assuming the space is fully claimed. Co-assignment is also rare across the dataset, meaning most white space around joint development structures remains unexplored too.