A hybrid model for the participation of water heaters in new complex demand response policies

Abstract

The participation of residential segments in electricity markets face to multitude of barriers. For instance, a minimum flexibility threshold level, achievable through aggregation, is required. These aggregation processes make more complex and slower the evaluation of response which can be a technical problem to respond to some services, for instance, ancillary services, and can get more and more complexity if a customer group is involved in several services. Thus, the aggregation process first requires the development of coherent load groups and then the simulation through elemental and aggregated models. The participation of groups of flexible loads in several markets and services presents an opportunity to achieve a greater revenue for the demand-side actors, the opportunity to share the cost of enabling technologies, that decreases customers engagement in DR, and the increase of the flexibility and capacity of networks. The proposal of this work is a platform that uses a physical-based hybrid model that suffers a segregation and a reduction of the model complexity to get an increase in the computational speed but considering the main physical phenomena to balance errors and the time of response.