Renewable Electricity Generation Impact on Peak Demand and Response Strategies

摘要

As renewable energy generation capacity is rapidly increasing worldwide, the impact of this phenomenon on electricity demand and demand response strategies is of interest to the research community, electricity providers, consumers and governments. Smart grid technologies enable providers to set dynamic pricing schemes in which the electricity costs are determined based on each consumer's unique electricity demand. These same technologies allow electricity consumers to use data-analytics techniques to manage their demand at the lowest costs and level of environmental impact. A consumer's demand response strategies play a key role to achieve this objective. While a significant portion of the current literature focuses on the implementation of renewable energy generation as a demand response tool during peak loads, this paper contributes a data-driven analysis that studies not only the changes in the electric load profile, but also in the amount of peak electric load days, the monthly peak electric loads timing, and the potential savings after executing demand response events. The results demonstrate that the adoption of renewable electricity generation not only changes the characteristics of a consumer's peak demand but also requires previous demand response strategies to be re-evaluated for efficiency as soon as the adoption takes place.