New insights for setting up contractual options for demand side flexibility

TL;DR

This paper introduces a demand duration curve-based approach for designing flexible demand-side contracts, utilizing event-based energy metering to improve peak demand tracking with less data.

Contribution

It proposes a novel method using demand duration curves and event-based metering to enhance demand-side flexibility options and tariff design.

Findings

Event-based energy metering provides detailed demand pattern reconstruction.

Demand duration curves enable new flexible tariff options.

Reduced data requirements for peak demand tracking.

Abstract

This paper exploits the Duration-of-Use of the demand patterns as a key concept for dealing with demand side flexibility. Starting from the consideration that fine-grained energy metering is not used at the point of supply of the electricity consumers, i.e., the granularity of the energy measured (at time steps of 15 minutes, 30 minutes or one hour), the event-based energy metering (EDM) is indicated as a viable option to provides a very detailed reconstruction of the demand patterns. The use of EDM enables high-quality tracking of the demand peaks with a reduced number of data with respect to the ones needed to measure energy at regular time steps for reaching a similar peak tracking capability. From the EDM outcomes, a new class of options for setting up tariffs or contracts for flexibility, based on the demand duration curve, is envisioned.