The Demand Charge

Advertising disclosure

Someone pays for this site. It is worth knowing who, and what they get for it.

Last updated 2026-08-08

How this site is funded

Two ways, one of them active.

Display advertising. The Demand Charge is being prepared for Google AdSense. Ads are sold by the network, not by the publisher, and neither the publisher nor any reader chooses which advertiser appears. Advertising is not currently running on this site; this page describes the arrangement in advance so it is in place before the first ad is served, rather than appearing afterwards as an afterthought.

Affiliate commission. Some software in this field — energy management platforms, interval data analysis tools, monitoring hardware — operates referral programs. Where this site links to such a product through a program that pays commission, the link is labeled at the point of use, and this page is updated to name the arrangement. As of the last update above, no affiliate relationship is in place.

What an advertiser buys

Space. That is the entire list.

What an advertiser does not buy

  • A mention in an article.
  • A favorable mention in an article.
  • The removal of an unfavorable one.
  • Sight of an article before it is published.
  • Influence over what subjects are covered.
  • A link, in any article, ever.

If an advertiser asks for any of these, the answer is no, and the request does not become a reason to write about them either. Nothing on this site is published in exchange for payment. That is a rule in the editorial policy, not a preference.

How ads are placed

When advertising is live, the placements will be:

  • Clearly labeled Advertisement.
  • Never styled to resemble an article link, a navigation element or a source citation.
  • Never placed above the headline of an article.
  • Limited to two units inside the body of an article, however long the article is.
  • Sized so the page does not jump under a reader as the unit loads.

Until a real publisher ID and a real ad unit exist, no ad container is rendered at all — no box, no border, no label, no reserved space. A dashed gray box announcing that a slot is empty is a note to self printed on a live website, and this site does not ship one.

Advertising can be personalized using data about your browsing. For readers in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, that requires consent collected through a consent management platform certified against IAB TCF v2.2, which is what this site will use.

Rejecting personalization does not remove advertising. It removes the profiling behind it: you see ads chosen by context rather than by an inferred profile. You can change or withdraw the choice at any time through Cookie settings in the footer. What is stored, and by whom, is in the cookie policy.

The rules that will apply:

How affiliate links are handled here
  1. The link is labeled where it appears, not only on this page.
  2. The commission does not change what the article concludes. A product that is wrong for a reader's situation is described as wrong for it, commission or no commission.
  3. No product is recommended that the author cannot describe accurately from its own documentation.
  4. The price you pay is not affected by using the link.
  5. If a program's terms conflict with any of the above, the site does not join the program.

Why this matters more than usual here

The audience for this site is people about to spend money — on a battery, on a control system, on a consultant, on switching a tariff. In that situation a publication whose incentives are hidden is worse than no publication at all. This page exists so the incentives are not hidden.

The commercial disclosure requirement also has a legal side: this site is published from Spain and follows the Spanish and EU rules on identifying commercial communications, including article 20 of Law 34/2002, which requires advertising to be identifiable as advertising. The same conclusion arrives from both directions.

Questions

Advertising enquiries, and any question about how a particular piece of content came to be written, go to contact@thedemandcharge.com. Questions of the second kind get answered.