Validation of a methodology to assess customer demand response: Application to the commercial sector

Demand Response (DR) is becoming more and more important in the framework of electricity systems management for the effective integration of other Distributed Energy Resources. To achieve this DR capability, customers must identify what they are using the energy for in order to use their flexible loads for management purposes. Modeling tools are used to predict the impact of flexibility on the behavior of customers, but this result needs to be validated since both customers and grid operators have to be confident in these flexibility predictions. According to this premise, the authors present a methodology, which is demonstrated with some applications to the commercial sector, in order to validate a DR evaluation method previously developed and applied to a wide range of industrial and commercial segments, whose flexibility was evaluated by modeling.