A Smart Contracting Framework for Aggregators of Demand-Side Response

Abstract

This paper proposes a software framework to facilitate the integration of operational flexibility from distributed energy resources (DER) into balancing services for the electricity system. In general, operational flexibility from industrial, commercial, and domestic customers is highly variable, and thus it is hard to characterise it into standardised balancing services. Moreover, customers might only know their flexible capacity a few hours before its realisation, such as having spare battery capacity that could be used for demand response (DR). In the same vein, customers should communicate promptly to their aggregator, so that their spare capacity could be used for balancing services, and thus acquire some revenue. We therefore propose a framework that allows electricity end-users to write their own short-term DR contracts and submit them to the aggregator’s digital platform.