Identification of price flexible spot contract customers from load data based on extreme events on electricity market

Abstract

The importance of flexibility on the electricity consumption side is increasing as more and more weather-dependent renewable production units are connected to electricity systems. Implicit load flexibility can have a major impact on the consumption profiles of customers of a distribution system operator (DSO), and thus on the distribution grid dimensioning. DSOs do not have information on the retail tariff choices of customers and thereby cannot estimate where flexible customers are in the distribution networks. In this paper, we study how extreme events on electricity market can be used to identify flexible customers with a spot-market-based contract and which kind of impact has a network tariff with a power-based fee had on flexibility. Our results show that 80–90% of customers, who were identified with a simple analysis of consumption data, were having spot-price-based contract on a day with extremely low electricity market prices.