2020 PES GM 8/5 Panel Video: Intelligent Demand-Side Management in Consumer-Centric Energy Systems

Owed to the proliferation of residential demand-side and internet-of-things technologies, which allow harvesting the flexibility of small-scale electricity consumers, power grid operations have become more sensitive to behavioral dynamics. Since these processes span across various timescales (from minutes to seasons) and engage different actors in addition to electricity consumers (utilities, third-party demand-side aggregators, electric vehicle charging companies), their impacts will be observed at the intra-regional (transmission), regional (distribution) and local (community) levels. It is anticipated that the behavior of end-users will play a pivotal role in future power systems, especially as new transactive platforms for small-scale electricity trading are being deployed. However, current decision-support tools and practices employed by transmission and distribution utilities fail to comprehensively account for the behavioral traits of electricity consumers.
The goal of this panel is to holistically explore the economic, regulatory and technical challenges and opportunities that arise in the context of consumer-centric power systems, electricity markets and other interdependent infrastructure systems (e.g., electrified transportation, water, natural gas networks). Methodologically, the panel will focus on bridging the gap between decision-support tools used in power grid operations and behavioral models of electricity consumers. The panelists will be invited to discuss how one can incentivize grid-friendly behavior of electricity consumers and discourage behavioral attributes that would reduce system-wide technical performance and economic welfare? How can behavioral features be retrieved from consumer-end smart meter data in a privacy-preserving manner? How can one internalize bounded rationality of electricity consumers in power grid decision support tools? How will consumer-centric operating and planning paradigms change the roles of traditional power grid actors and interactions among them?