Assessment of the regionalised demand response potential in Germany using an open source tool and dataset

TL;DR

This study assesses the regional demand response potential across Germany using open source tools and data, highlighting significant potentials in power-to-heat, residential, commercial, and industrial loads to mitigate renewable curtailment.

Contribution

It provides a detailed regional analysis of demand response potential in Germany with open source tools, considering various technologies and cost curves for 2030 scenarios.

Findings

Power-to-heat technologies offer the highest demand response potential.

Median load shifting potential per district is 25 MW, enough to avoid curtailing 8 wind turbines.

Most load shifting costs are below the average curtailment compensation cost of €110/MWh.

Abstract

With the expansion of renewable energies in Germany, imminent grid congestion events occur more often. One approach for avoiding curtailment of renewable energies is to cover excess feed-in by demand response. As curtailment is often a local phenomenon, in this work we determine the regional demand response potential for the 401 German administrative districts. The load regionalisation is based on weighting factors derived from population and employment statistics, locations of industrial facilities, etc. Using periodic and temperature-dependent load profiles and technology specific parameters, load shifting potentials were determined with a temporal resolution of 15 minutes. Our analysis yields that power-to-heat technologies provide the highest potentials, followed by residential appliances, commercial and industrial loads. For the considered 2030 scenario, power-to-gas and e-mobility also contribute a significant potential. The cumulated load increase potential of all technologies ranges from $5 - 470~MW$ per administrative district. The median value is $25~MW$, which would suffice to avoid the curtailment of 8 classical wind turbines. Further, we calculated load shifting cost-potential curves for each district. Industrial processes and power-to-heat in district heating have the lowest load shifting investment cost, due to the largest installed capacities per facility. We distinguished between different size classes of the installed capacity of heat pumps, yielding $23\%$ lower average investment cost for heat pump flexibilisation in the city of Berlin compared to a rural district. The variable costs of most considered load shifting technologies remain under the average compensation costs for curtailment of renewable energies of $110~\text{\euro{}}/MWh$. As all results and the developed code are published under open source licenses, they can be integrated into energy system models.