Simulation-supported quantification of flexibility: assessing the potential for blocks of buildings to participate in demand response markets

Local communities have hitherto been largely excluded from participating in the same flexibility markets that power plants and other grid-scale flexible assets participate in. The switching of a number of loads at household level, with individual, non-equal properties and constraints increases the complexity, which is one of the main reasons that smaller loads have not been tackled massively for demand response (DR) purposes yet. Our work offers insight into methods for assessing flexibility constituted by a larger number of assets (households) which are characterized by a combination of different energy systems. We present a modeling and simulation study based on a real net-positive energy neighborhood in Wuestenrot, Germany. The results of our model simulating 100 buildings with heat pumps, electric boilers, heat storages, photovoltaic (PV) systems and batteries show that large seasonal and daily fluctuations in available flexible energy exist. Also, upward (load increase) and downward (load reduction) potentials were shown to be not exactly symmetrical. The differing distributions of the upward and downward flexibilities is of interest, as it suggests that to use this downward flexibility, advanced and robust DR control strategies must be applied.