Residential electricity consumption varies throughout the day in a consumer-specific pattern. If a large number of consumers are aggregated, flexibility in their combined consumption and own generation, i.e. "active demand" (AD), may be used, e.g. for load reduction in certain areas. Since both the electricity markets and the physical electricity systems differ across Europe to some respect, preconditions may also differ for establishing efficient consumer participation in active demand activities. This paper studies preconditions, possibilities and barriers for active demand in the Nordic countries. The analysis is based on preliminary findings of the EC FP7 project ADDRESS (ECGA no. 207643) commenced in 2008 and continuing until 2012. ADDRESS is an Official Partner of EC Sustainable Energy Europe Campaign. The project consortium counts 25 participants including ENEL, EdF, ABB, Iberdrola, VTT and Vattenfall. One of the objectives of ADDRESS is to design technical and business conditions for an aggregator to enable active participation of domestic and small commercial consumers in power system markets. This will be achieved by aggregating flexible demand and generation of equipment installed at consumer's premises such as electrical appliances, distributed generation and energy storage. It is anticipated that active demand services could be valuable to network operators, balancing responsible parties, owners of non-controllable generation, a. o. ADDRESS will develop and test cost-effective technical solutions to enable active demand and evaluate business cases for exploiting its benefits. Utilising active demand will become increasingly important in conjunction with introduction of Smart Metering and Smart Grids.
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