Analysis of Demand Side Response potential in energy clusters

The paper analyses the possibilities of Demand Side Response (DSR) applications from the point of view of an electricity power cluster. Three possible scenarios for DSR mechanisms that facilitate balancing the cluster in short horizon were formulated. Two scenarios include shifting a part of demand that creates unplanned balancing energy in the cluster. In the first scenario, the unplanned balancing energy is moved to hours with lower prices on the Balancing Market (BM), while in second scenarios we assume that this energy is bought on the competitive market. The third scenario concerns mitigation of investment cost for local distributed resources (DERs) due to DSR program. We present an analysis of monetary savings that has been carried out for exemplary clusters in Polish electrical energy system and based on Polish Balancing Market and Power Exchange data. Although the potential savings per household are too small to create strong incentives for DSR, this amount of money could be notable for the local community as a whole. There is also a big opportunity for increasing the benefits resulting from DSR in case of perceived stronger differentiation of unbalanced prices on BM as well as strong trend for price increase. We believe that presented results may play an important role to draw the potential development directions for national power clusters.