• No industrial plant is designed, financed, or managed with the purpose of getting paid to stand idle.

  • The compensation under the Active Demand Response Service (SRAD) is necessary, but an exceptional measure cannot become routine.

  • Industry can and must be part of the system’s flexibility. What it cannot become is the system’s flexibility itself.

  • To what extent does financial compensation offset a factory’s real operational losses?

  • Getting paid to disconnect from the grid may polish short-term financial results, but it does not replace the company’s reason for being.

September 11, 2026.

On July 15, Red Eléctrica de España activated the Active Demand Response Service (SRAD) for the first time this year—that is, the curtailment of industrial activity due to energy scarcity. This call to action has now been repeated six times over the summer due to sporadic tensions in the peninsular electricity system, a pace never seen since the mechanism was launched.

SRAD was established under Royal Decree-Law 17/2022 of September 20 as a specific balancing product for exceptional reserve-shortage situations, when standard services already in operation are insufficient to balance the system. It is, therefore, a voluntary and remunerated mechanism: for the second half of 2026, 1,775 MW have been awarded at a remuneration of €42.62 per MW and hour of availability, to which is added remuneration for the energy actually mobilized when an activation occurs.

However, the recurrence of these calls within such a short timeframe raises a critical question for the productive fabric: to what extent does financial compensation offset a factory’s real operational losses, and what are the consequences of normalizing demand interruption as a routine system-balancing tool?

The Incentive Hook: Industry Wasn’t Built to Stop

Paying industry to reduce consumption is appropriate—of course it is: it’s a real, voluntary service that prevents greater problems in the system. If a facility is required to alter its energy schedule to safeguard grid balance, remuneration must be fair, and it is.

The debate begins one step further. No industrial plant is designed, financed, or managed with the purpose of getting paid to stand idle: it is built to produce, to generate economic activity, to keep shifts, contracts, and supply chains running. The core of its competitiveness lies in volume, efficiency, continuity of the production process, and strict compliance with commercial commitments to customers and suppliers.

This is where SRAD’s economic rationale, while legitimate, harbors a conceptual trap: getting paid to disconnect from the grid may polish short-term financial results, but it does not replace the company’s reason for being. Every paid hour of curtailment is, at bottom, an hour of economic activity not generated and of productive employment not sustained by its own logic, but by that of an incentive designed for the electricity system, not the factory.

A Factory Is Not a Light Switch

That incentive, designed for the electricity system, collides in practice with a reality: a factory is not a household light switch. When the operator calls upon SRAD, a chain reaction is triggered in which indirect costs often dwarf the remuneration received.

In processes with high thermal inertia—glass and ceramic melting furnaces, electric arc furnaces in steelmaking, electrolysis cells in aluminum—switching off is not simply “cutting the power.” An unscheduled cooldown causes cracks in refractory materials and premature wear on machinery, and returning to nominal operating temperature requires long preparation hours. Added to this is the energy toll of restart: the consumption needed to bring a process back to its optimal regime is usually higher than that of steady-state operation. Paradoxically, to save energy for the system today, the factory may have to consume an extraordinary peak tomorrow.

The adjustment doesn’t stop at the furnace: it impacts logistics, generates penalties for delivery delays, and disrupts work shifts, while labor continues to count in the cost structure with declining hourly productivity. It’s a cascading effect that often extends far beyond the two hours an activation lasts, undermining the company’s ability to meet its fixed costs: electricity, wages, commitments to customers.

SRAD compensation remunerates availability and mobilized energy. It is necessary. But it does not make the economic cost of interrupting productive activity free. That is why the price of an interrupted MWh is, almost never, the value of an MWh not consumed.

From Safety Net to Everyday Crutch?

SRAD was launched in late 2022 as an extraordinary mechanism—a safety belt for moments of acute grid stress. However, the concatenation of six consecutive activations since mid-July raises alarms about the risk of turning exception into norm.

As we warned from Foro Industria y Energía back in January 2025, when a single SRAD activation was enough to pose the same question that now repeats with greater force: are we normalizing industry as the system’s default fuse? A year and a half later, the answer begins to emerge in the very calendar of activations.

If the electricity system begins to rely on industrial interruptibility as an everyday crutch to manage demand peaks or renewable volatility, we will be shifting the responsibility for system flexibility onto the shoulders of real production. Normalizing industry as the first fuse to blow when the grid tightens sends a discouraging signal to industrial investment.

That is why the debate should not be framed as a choice between electricity system and industry. Industry can and must be part of the system’s flexibility. What it cannot become is the system’s flexibility itself. There is an important difference: one thing is for a plant to voluntarily adapt part of its consumption because it has real capacity to do so without compromising its production process, and another very different thing is to build a system that increasingly depends on certain industries being ready to reduce their activity when other pieces of the equation fail.

More Flexibility, But Also More System

The solution is not to stop using SRAD. It would be a mistake to dispense with a tool that provides valuable response capacity and, moreover, allows demand to participate actively in system operation. The question is what other resources we develop to the same level.

More storage to shift energy over time. More grids to transport electricity where it is needed. More interconnections to share response capacity. More dispatchable generation and adequately sized reserves. And, above all, flexibility mechanisms capable of differentiating between truly shiftable loads and those industrial processes whose interruption cost is much higher than the remuneration they receive.

The energy transition will require demand to be more flexible. But it must also ensure that the system is robust enough not to need that industrial flexibility recurrently. Because paying a factory to reduce consumption may be an efficient decision for the electricity system, but if we want a competitive, electrified industry capable of long-term investment, the underlying question is different: how many times can we ask it to stop before the cost of doing so ceases to be exceptional? We should not be asking how much industry can stop, but how much it can flex without compromising its competitiveness.