Technical resource potential of non-disruptive residential demand response in Denmark

Denmark has one of the most aggressive renewable energy strategies in the world; however, large penetrations of fluctuating renewable energy resources will pose new problems in the Danish power system. Demand response (DR) has the potential to mitigate these problems by providing a new source of flexibility. This paper estimates the technical resource potential of residential DR in Denmark. We focus on DR that is non-disruptive to the consumer, meaning that DR actions harness inherent load flexibility and are not noticeable by the consumer. We build on existing methodologies for computing DR technical resource potentials, and use real data from Denmark. We find that country-wide load flexibility is on the order of GWs and GWhs, and will increase drastically over the next 20 years due to electrification of space heating systems and vehicles. However, we also find that flexibility is time-varying on timescales of hours to months, and this variability will become more pronounced with electrification.