Quantifying the Flexibility of Residential Electricity Demand in 2050: a Bottom-Up Approach

This work presents a new method to quantify the flexibility of automatic demand response, combined with real time pricing, applied to residential electricity demand using price elasticities. A stochastic bottom-up model of flexible electricity demand in 2050 is presented. Three types of flexible devices are implemented: electric heating, electric vehicles and wet appliances. Each house schedules its flexible demand w.r.t. a varying price signal, in order to minimize its electricity cost. Own-and cross-price elasticities are obtained through a regression analysis. Via a Monte Carlo approach-based method, the elasticities are scaled up to a country level. The results show that the electric energy demand will double and that, when combining automatic demand response with real time pricing, power peaks in demand could be incurred that are 5 to 8 times greater than today. The elasticity matrices show that for Belgium most flexibility is available in winter and least in summer.