Assessment of the regionalised demand response potential in Germany using an open source tool and dataset

With the expansion of renewable energies in Germany, imminent grid congestion events occur more often. One approach for avoiding curtailment of renewable energies is to cover excess feed-in by demand response. As curtailment is often a local phenomenon, in this work we determine the regional demand response potential for the 401 German administrative districts with a temporal resolution of 15 min, including technical, socio-technical and economic restrictions. Our analysis yields that power-to-heat technologies provide the highest potentials, followed by residential appliances, commercial and industrial loads. For the considered 2030 scenario, power-to-gas and e-mobility also contribute a significant potential. The median value of the cumulated load increase potential of all technologies is 25 MW per administrative district. Using such a load increase potential to cover regional excess feed-in would suffice to avoid the curtailment of 8 classical wind turbines. Further, we calculated load shifting cost-potential curves for each district. Industrial processes and power-to-heat in district heating have the lowest load shifting investment cost, due to the largest installed capacities per facility. We distinguished between different size classes of the installed capacity of heat pumps, yielding 23% lower average investment cost for heat pump flexibilisation in the city of Berlin compared to a rural district. The variable costs of most considered load shifting technologies remain under the average compensation costs for curtailment of renewable energies of 110 (sic) /MWh. As all results and the developed code are published under open source licenses, they can be used to integrate load shifting dispatch into energy system models.

Automated summary

By analyzing the demand response potential in different German districts, it is found that power-to-heat technologies offer the highest potential to cover excess renewable energies. The median value of the load increase potential for different technologies is about 25 MW per administrative district, enough to avoid the curtailment of traditional wind turbines.