The sole responsibility for the content of this report lies with the authors. It does not represent the opinion of the European Communities or the BMU. The European Commission and the BMU are not responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein. www.smart-a.org This report summarises the results of the European project " Smart Domestic Appliances in Sustainable Energy Systems (Smart-A) " , which assesses the potential synergies from coordinating the energy demand of domestic appliances with the generation of electricity and heat from renewable energies or cogeneration with other load management requirements in electricity networks. The project was supported by the European Commission through the IEE program 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 4 Executive Summary Executive Summary 5 Europe has set the ambitious target of a 20% share of overall energy demand to be supplied from renewable energy by 2020. It is expected that in order to achieve this target, the share of renewable energy in the electricity sector will need to increase to some 35%, which means more than doubling the levels which were achieved by 2005. Most of the increase will come from wind and solar energy, which are both fluctuating resources by nature. In the longer run, industrialised countries will have to reduce their carbon emissions by more than 80% compared to 1990, which may require a complete decarbonisation of the electricity sector by the year 2050. One of the major challenges associated with this drastic restructuring of our energy supply is how electricity networks can cope with the variability of wind and solar energy production. This challenge is actually twofold: On the one hand we need the scheduled generation of electricity and demand to match at all times. The progress made in forecasting wind energy production will support the reliability of the schedules for wind generation, but future electricity systems will face higher variability in scheduled power generation. This must be levelled out by increasing the existing capacities for energy storage, e.g. in pumped hydro power plants, and by adapting significant shares of the electricity demand to the available renewable energy production. On the other hand, the increased volatility in electricity generation requires a larger margin of reserve capacity in the energy system, which can react to unexpected deviations from the scheduled production or demand. With less and less conventional power generation in the system, we …