Decentralised market agent — Accessing central markets with demand side management technologies

Within the German energy transition, several challenges arise. Shifting electricity supply from a centralistic, unidirectional system towards a decentralized, bi-directional system with a significantly increased number of stakeholders and thus conflicting interests leads to a number of technical, political, social and economic debates. However, there is an overall agreement that the importance of distribution grid operation, decentralised energy generation and flexible generation technologies will be essential elements of future energy systems. This paper presents the concept of a new market role, the “Decentralised Market Agent” (DMA), which optimizes the system operation and expansion on distribution grid level. To do so, one of the potential flexibility technologies is Demand Side Management (DSM), which is analysed in more detail in this paper. With regard to the tasks and objective of the DMA, the requirements and potentials of DSM are discussed and evaluated qualitatively. Based on this, an analysis of applicable DSM measures in households as well as for an industrial consumer is conducted. This serves as a basis for the evaluation of the technical and economic potential DSM might hold for the DMA.