It gathered 25 partners located in 11 European Member States to define, develop and demonstrate how demand response can make the consumption of millions of electricity customers more flexible for the benefits of the whole electricity system. Active demand combines:
the coordination of large numbers of electricity consumers through an aggregation function carried out by deregulated players;
the involvement of innovative technologies to support this coordination and to act upon electrical loads in the customer premises;
additional resources brought by energy players and electricity grid operators to upgrade the electricity system management and perform the coordination activities at a very large scale;
Thus, active demand is faced with:
a very high complexity of the proposed solution, since involving millions of customers while leaning on several stakeholders who own and run the electricity system;
the needs for high customer involvement, which is a prerequisite to ensure its commercial success;
the deployment of a full new piece of the electricity value chain for which no regulatory rules are in place to allow for its large scale deployment in Europe.
The ADDRESS partners have designed a complete technical and commercial concept to support active demand (the so-called ADDRESS model) : consumers can provide active demand by making their electricity consumption more flexible, since adequate devices (hardware and software) control the operations of selected home appliances, as well as local electricity generation and storage systems when relevant (prosumers). These devices (the energy boxes or EBoxes) are physical interfaces between the consumer demand, their appliances and the aggregation functions. They manage consumer demand based on customer preferences, aggregating signals and the specific appliance functionalities. The aggregation functions are in charge to pool consumer’s flexibility in view of shaping several potential active demand commercial products. These products are then sold via bilateral contracts, successful bids on organized energy and/or flexibility markets or bids in response to call for tenders from network operators. In ADDRESS, each willing consumer provides the aggregation function with modifications of his/her consumption profile: aggregation functions are therefore in charge of selling a deviation from the forecasted level of demand, but not a specific level of demand
ADDRESS has studied 3 active demand products involving real time price and volume signals, viz:
- Scheduled re-profiling: the aggregation function has the obligation to provide a specified demand modification (reduction or increase) at a given time to the product buyer.
- Conditional re-profiling: the aggregation function must have the capacity to provide a specified demand modification (reduction or increase) during a given period, when called upon by the product buyer (similar to a reserve service).
- Bi-directional conditional re-profiling: the aggregation function must have the capacity to provide a specified demand modification during a given period in a bi-directional range [ -y, x ] MW, including both demand increase and decrease, when called upon by the product buyer (similar to a reserve service).
In all three cases, the delivery of active demand services require aggregation functions sending to the consumer EBoxes within their portfolios the price and volume signals which should produce the needed aggregated consumption modifications with respect to the forecast. These price and volume signals involve incentives associated to volume (power) limits.
These three base line products can be combined to provide 31 different active demand services, namely seven services for regulated players (DSOs and TSOs) and twenty-four services for deregulated players (involving for instance large consumers, balancing responsible parties, electricity retailers, centralized electricity producers, etc.) leading to 31 use cases which were developed in the project.
New functionalities are needed on the side of the electricity network operators: TSOs and DSOs provide aggregation functions and all the market players with maps of load areas to be able to localize active demand actions or programs on the network. On the one hand, this localization allows the request for and subsequent provision of topologically dependant Active Demand products and on the other side it allows the technical validation by the network operators of the Active Demand actions or programs prepared by the aggregation functions in order to avoid network constraint violations and guarantee the electricity system security. In this respect coordination between the TSO and the involved DSOs appears to be necessary (this is crucial for system security and efficiency). Flexibility tables are provided as well in order to give indications on what is the flexibility allowed, upwards and downwards, in each load area, thus minimizing the risk of failing the technical validation process. New tools or functionalities are also needed for the DSOs and TSOs to be able to use Active Demand for their own needs in the network operations.
The full system has been tested in three Member States (France, Italy, Spain), involving electricity producers and consumers. These three demonstrations allow providing recommendations for future deployment on the improvement, the cost and standardization of active demand technologies, the role of consumer acceptance and consumer commitment, the verification / measurement of active demand product delivery, the reliability of the full value chain and the regulatory options needed to deploy efficiently. The three complementary test sites (Italy, Spain and France) provide new knowledge to show experimentally the demand response benefits and to compare good practices in view of achieving scaling up and replication via other on-going projects in the active demand field (Grid4Vehicle, Grid4EU, Green e-Motion, S3C, ADVANCED).
This article is linked to a series of knowledge article detailing the outputs of the ADDRESS project:
For more information, please visit http://www.addressfp7.org/.