Assessing impact of demand response in emission-constrained environments

Reducing the emissions produced by the electric power production may be one of the most challenging problems of the electricity sector in the coming future. As one of the potential solutions, demand response (DR) can play an important role to reduce emissions and costs associated with emission reduction activities. This paper aims to assess the short-term impacts of running a DR program on a power system constrained by emissions caps. The DR program is designed to procure operating reserve from demand-side participants. A day-ahead network-constrained market clearing model with emission cap constraints is used as the assessment tool, where the DR program participants along with generating units are considered as available resources to provide reserve for the system. A model is also presented for reserve provided by DRPs and its associated cost function. The proposed approach is applied to the IEEE-RTS to illustrate the impacts of the DR program.