Summary and conclusions - IEA Demand Side Management ...

especially from the local networks’ point of view. The services to the electricitysystem provided by EVs will be additional benefit in the future.Heat pumps represent another emerging end-use technology in many countries.They are used for heating in countries with a cold climate and for cooling incountries with hot summers or for both purposes. In principle heat pumps aresuitable for demand response for several reasons like they can be controlledsimilar way as electric heating and other air-conditioning systems: due to thenatural (building mass) and artificial heat storages the heating/hot waterproduction and cooling can be switched off for certain time periods. However,some obstacles exist for the use of heat pumps for demand response like there are not much experiences from the use of heat pumps for demandresponse and therefore also technical solutions have not been developed after the control period of heat pumps their load will be high and this “payback”has to be taken into account in the control strategy starting current of heat pumps after switch-off or blackouts can be high andproblematic to the networks; this has to be taken into accountµ-CHP technologies generate both heat and power and can thus be considered insites where a sufficient heat load is present. It has seen as a promising technologyto produce electricity locally. DR is easily implemented with µ-CHP becausethermal storages are becoming more commonplace. However, the penetration ofµ-CHP is still low and much less than expected some years ago. The main reasonfor this is that the prices of the technology have not gone as expected.PV in customers’ premises is increasing rapidly in some countries. The rapidincrease of PV capacity is related to the two main factors: PV technology and manufacturing capacity are increased rapidly which hasresulted in the decrease of PV prices. In 2011 prices decreased even up tomore than 50 % in some countries. Energy policies with incentives and feed-in tariffs have supported the PVdevelopmentSmart metering is a technology which is essential in the road to smart grids and tothe integration of active customers to the electrical networks and to the market.The penetration is increasing quite rapidly in Europe due to the Europeanlegislation. At the moment countries are in different stage: some countries havealready almost 100 % penetration and some are in the experimental phase. Costbenefitanalyses show in most cases that smart metering is in most caseseconomically feasible if the benefits to all stakeholders and to society are4 takeninto account. It seems to be important to develop standardization and functionalrequirements to such a directions that all the benefits from DER can be obtained.Stakeholder involvement and effectsMicrogeneration and new end-use technologies can present significant effects toseveral stakeholders. Most importantly, the consumer himself, network companiesand electricity supplier (retailer) are involved. Network companies may eitherbenefit or suffer from the introduction of microgeneration, heat pumps and EV,depending on the specific technology and how it is used. The consumer cancontract an aggregator to sell the microgeneration or reprofiled consumption tocompetitive energy market participants or network companies. Manufacturers