Design of an Event-Driven Residential Demand Response Infrastructure (Invited Paper)

Event-driven demand response programs reward consumers for shifting their electricity loads upon requests from an aggregator, a balance responsible party, or a distribution system operator. In order to have any significant impact on the smart grid, the flexibility exhibited on the demand-side needs to be aggregated from a large number of consumers. This poses significant scalability challenges for the ICT infrastructure that controls flexible electricity loads. This paper reports from the European research project SEMIAH. The project aims to design a scalable infrastructure for residential demand response. The study presents progress towards the system design of a centralized load scheduling algorithm for controlling home appliances over time. The demand response system takes the power grid constraints and satisfaction of consumers into account. Simulation results from a case study quantify the potential impact of a residential demand response program.