Demand Flexibility: A Review of Quantification Methods, Models, and Required Data

As renewable energy is increasingly integrated into our electricity supply, it becomes more challenging to ensure reliability and security due to the intermittent nature of these resources. With the electrification of buildings and technological advancements across various aspects of their operations, the building sector is expected to play a key role in reducing emissions while supporting the needs of the grid. Buildings and the loads they house can provide grid resources via demand flexibility, shifting, and shedding electric load, as necessary. This key resource has received increased attention from researchers, building operators, electric utilities, policymakers, and system operators as a tool to improve power grid reliability and reduce system costs. Before increasing reliance on demand flexibility, however, a better understanding of its availability is needed to inform planning efforts. This paper includes a review of the literature on current methods and data used to model the available flexibility of power delivered to customers. This review also summarizes how demand flexibility is defined and quantified to help inform future studies in this field. The results of this review illustrate the diversity found within this field of research and the innovation that researchers are employing to solve this complex problem.