According to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, demand response is defined as: “Changes in electric usage by end-use customers from their normal consumption patterns in response to changes in the price of electricity over time, or to incentive payments designed to induce lower electricity use at times of high wholesale market prices or when system reliability is jeopardized.”
Following up on this idea, the project RESPOND (integrated demand REsponse Solution towards energy POsitive NeighbourhooDs) has been developed. It has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.
Nowadays, demand response is mostly implemented in the industrial sector, but there are many current tendencies that try to deliver it in the domestic environment as well. The aim of this project indeed is to adapt demand response so that domestic consumers can benefit from it: to implement a cooperative energy demand management solution for residential energy users to better match energy supply with demand, reducing energy consumption during periods of peak demand in exchange for financial incentives. A very important focus when developing the solution has been to do it in a way as universal as possible, and feasible to implement in any European dwelling.
RESPOND has been carried out by an interdisciplinary committee (11 partners from 5 different countries: Czech Republic, Denmark, Ireland, Serbia and Spain), committed to capacity-building, technology and tools that benefit energy suppliers and consumers under the umbrella of demand response.
To demonstrate its potential, the RESPOND solution has been deployed in three pilot sites chosen at different geographical locations, in different climatic zones, with different underlying energy systems, forms of ownership, population densities, thus providing a diversity of opportunities for the project demonstration.
To this end, RESPOND’s overall goals have been:
• Cooperative demand management to maximize the use of common energy resources
• Engagement of building occupants
• Improved system integration and interoperability
• Strategy towards EEB public private partnership
• Efficient business model definition at building and district level
