Evolution of Demand Response: A Historical Analysis of Legislation and Research Trends

In the past two decades, interest in demand response (DR) schemes has grown exponentially. The need for DR has been driven by sustainability (environmental and socioeconomic) and cost-efficiency. The main premise of DR is to influence the timing and magnitude of consumption to match energy supply by sharing the benefits with consumers, ultimately aiming to optimize generation cost. As such, the first and primary enabler to DR was the establishment of contemporary electricity markets. Increased proliferation of Distributed Energy Resources (DER) and microgeneration further motivated the participation of consumers as active players in the market, popularizing DR and the wider category of Demand-Side Management (DSM) programs. Smart Grids (SG) have been an enabler to modern DR schemes, with smart metering data providing input to the underlying optimization and forecasting tools. The more recent emergence of the Internet of Energy (IoE), seen as the evolution of SG, is driven by increased Internet of Things (IoT)-enabling and high penetration of scalable and distributed energy resources. In this IoE paradigm being a fully decentralized network of energy prosumers, DR will continue to be a vital aspect of the grid in future Transactive Energy (TE) schemes, aiming for a more user-centered, energy-efficient, cost-saving, energy management approach. This paper investigates original motives and identifies the first mentions of DR in the legislative and scientific literature. Afterwards, the evolution of DR is tracked over the past four decades, attempting to study the co-influence of legislation and research by performing a thorough statistical analysis of research trends on the IEEE Xplore digital library. Finally, conclusions are made as to the current state of DR and future prospects of DR are discussed.