Will Smart Cities give birth to new types of aggregators?

The notion of demand response sends back to us most of the time to the answers brought to the mechanisms of load balancing. These mechanisms, generally managed by the transmission system operator, can have several supports: adjustment mechanism, capacity market.

They can give rise to programs managed by the electricity suppliers to incite the consumers to increase the demand response capacity.

Demand response is also linked to the reduction of the peak load intended to limit the purchases of energy or the use of peak power plants..

But in the case of a Smart City having deployed a local energy system, based on energies of various origins, the local balance consists more in making correspond as much as possible the curve of production and the curve of consumption. In other words, in a peak of production of production has to correspond, if possible, a peak of consumption.

The example of Kalundborg, in Denmark, is interesting. This city developed an energy system, that is particularly performing, to manage an important part of production of renewable electricity. Speaking about this system, a representative of the city explains:

“This entire system will be based on an open, intelligent platform called the Energy Services Hub.  The Hub will enable diverse participants to make specific energy resources available to the system via a publish-and-subscribe model.  An individual enterprise, water utility, or demand aggregator, for example, could use the platform to offer a specified demand response capacity to grid operators looking to manage fluctuations in power supply or reduce the need for network reinforcement.”

In the trail of this evolution, aggregators see emerging the real strategic question: will they have to concentrate and specialize on the current mechanisms or address these new needs which, apparently, will not remain limited to the field of the electricity? Can we predict the emergence of a multi-energy aggregator and operator in every big city?

I tend to think so.

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