Benefits and barriers concerning demand response stakeholder value chain: A systematic literature review

Demand Response (DR) is acknowledged to play a relevant role in future electrical power systems. To achieve decarbonization, increasing shares of renewable electricity will induce changes in market design and system operation. New opportunities and challenges will emerge for all market participants. However, regulatory and technology bottlenecks combined with conflicts of interest among actors may deaccelerate DR implementation. This research performed a systematic literature review on five different databases to identify DR benefits and barriers attributable to different actors. Both benefits and barriers were found for all the stakeholders. Consumer bill savings and financial incentives were the most common benefits attributable to DR, on the contrary, consumer lack of interest and knowledge, privacy protection and cyber security were the most common referred barriers. In the second stage, both benefits and barriers were respectively divided into four main categories: Society-wide; Technology-wide; Financial and Market-wide and Environmental-wide benefits and Technologywide, Economic and Market-wide context barriers. The classification of individual benefits and barriers demonstrated that some categories, such as technology-wide, are relevant both for benefits and barriers. DR implementation complexity and the number of stakeholders involved require DR policies to have certain specific characteristics to give them directionality towards DR successful implementation.

Automated summary

Demand Response (DR) is believed to have a crucial role in the future power systems. The increasing share of renewable electricity will bring about changes in market design and system operation, creating new opportunities and challenges for all market participants. However, regulatory and technology barriers, alongside conflicts of interest among actors, may hinder the implementation of DR.