title: Demand-Side Flexibility – Enabled and Enhanced by Information Technologies in Current and Future Electricity Systems
Creators: name: Schott, Paul
Publisher: name: University of Bayreuth
Year: 2021
Subjects: subject: Energy Transition
subject: Renewable Energy Sources
subject: Demand-Side Management
subject: Flexibility
subject: Electricity Market Design
subject: 004
subject: 330
subject: 620

description: Renewable energy sources can contribute to the decarbonization of electricity systems around the world. Due to their weather dependency, however, renewables such as photovoltaic and wind power plants generate electricity intermittently. This makes it a challenge to ensure grid stability, i. e., the required balance between electricity generation and consumption. Flexibility options, such as grid flexibility, storage flexibility, supply-side flexibility, and demand-side flexibility, can all play a part in ensuring that this balance is always guaranteed. A particular potential for flexibility, and one that remains largely untapped, lies on the demand side. Therefore, this doctoral thesis examines demand-side flexibility and the ways in which information technologies could enable and indeed enhance the exploitation of demand-side flexibility in current and future electricity systems. First, this doctoral thesis focuses on how these four flexibility options contribute to grid stability. Subsequently, the focus will shift to the demand-side flexibility of companies in the industrial sector and corresponding prerequisites and opportunities to market demand-side flexibility in current electricity systems. In particular, digital flexibility trading platforms offer great potential to enhance the exchange of information between different stakeholders. However, the use of information technologies in the exploitation and automation of demand-side flexibility requires a standardized communication protocol about flexibility. The purpose of this doctoral thesis, then, is to analyze the possibilities to standardize communication of flexibility while taking into account the degrees of freedom as well as the restrictions on flexibility. Despite the great potential for demand-side flexibility, however, several obstacles currently get in the way of companies leveraging this potential. To reduce or indeed remove these obstacles, this doctoral thesis will consider these obstacles and the ways in which they get in the way of companies. Since renewables have also led to increasing decentralization and the corresponding divergence of markets and physics, there have been certain inefficiencies due to corrective measures. With a view to future electricity systems, this doctoral thesis will illustrate possible design options for future electricity markets that account for the rich potential of information technology to exploit demand-side flexibility. This doctoral thesis is a cumulative work that comprises seven research papers. To summarize, it contributes to a better understanding of (industrial) demand-side flexibility by highlighting the extent to which information technologies can enable and indeed enhance new opportunities to make the demand side more flexible and thus contribute to the decarbonization of current and future electricity systems.