Large-scale Residential Demand Response ICT Architecture

The Flemish project Linear is an example of an ongoing large scale residential demand response pilot that aims to validate innovative smart grid applications that exploit the rollout of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the power grid. In this paper, we discuss the design of such a scalable, reliable and interoperable ICT infrastructure that interconnects 245 residential power grid customers with the backend systems of various actors: e.g., energy service providers (ESPs), flexibility aggregators, distribution system operators (DSOs), balancing responsible parties (BRPs). The use cases rolled out in Linear, built on top of our proposed ICT architecture, involve sharing both metering data and flexibility information (esp. for time shifting) of the households, and demand response (DR) algorithms for the balancing of renewable energy and the mitigation of voltage and power issues in distribution grids.