Modeling and Valuation of Residential Demand Flexibility for Renewable Energy Integration

The share of renewable generation (RG) in the energy mix has seen constant growth in recent years. RG is volatile and not (fully) controllable. Consequently, the alignment of stochastic demand with supply, which is fundamental for ensuring grid stability, becomes more difficult. The utilization of demand side flexibility as well as RG portfolio design are attractive opportunities to avoid excessive investments in conventional power plants and costs for balancing power. This paper provides a comprehensive centralized scheduling model to exploit demand flexibility from residential devices. We analyze the monetary value of households for demand response (DR) by determining the potential of various current and possible available future end consumer devices to reduce generation costs of a flexibility aggregator in a microgrid with a large share of RG. Furthermore, we identify key characteristics affecting the value of demand flexibility and derive recommendations for an aggregator’s RG portfolio structure. Our simulation results indicate that electric vehicles, stationary batteries, and storage heaters are the most promising devices for residential DR. Furthermore, we show that the potential of a device to directly utilize intermittent RG is largely influenced by the composition of the renewable energy source portfolio.