Enhancing the European power system resilience with a recommendation system for voluntary demand response

Abstract

Summary: Climate change, geopolitical tensions, and decarbonization targets are bringing the resilience of the European electric power system to the forefront of discussion. Among various regulatory and technological solutions, voluntary demand response can help balance generation and demand during periods of energy scarcity or renewable energy generation surplus. This work presents an open data service called Interoperable Recommender that leverages publicly accessible data to calculate a country-specific operational balancing risk, providing actionable recommendations to empower citizens toward adaptive energy consumption, considering interconnections and local grid constraints. Using semantic interoperability, it enables third-party services to enhance energy management and customize applications to consumers. Real-world pilots in Portugal, Greece, and Croatia with over 300 consumers demonstrated the effectiveness of providing signals across diverse contexts. For instance, in Portugal, 7% of the hours included actionable recommendations, and metering data revealed a consumption decrease of 4% during periods when consumers were requested to lower consumption.

Keywords

• Engineering
• Energy engineering
• Energy systems