Can power systems afford (not) to rely on flexible demand?

Abstract

Electricity systems will be in desperate need of flexibility. Current large scale thermal plants provide flexibility in spades. They can ramp up and down as demand requires. Renewables have begun to effectively displace these high emitting plants, and with them we lose their valuable flexibility. Much hope rests on two new players to fill the gap: storage and demand side response. Phil will attempt to unpack what roles they could play and what we actually mean by demand response. He identified a number of ways (as many as 8 perhaps) to make demand more flexible. Very different instruments may be required to realise them. We will discuss if there might be more interesting approaches than time-use-tariffs alone.

Biography

Phil was part of the second cohort of Imperial’s Sustainability Energy Futures MSc students and went on to do a PhD at Imperial’s Centre for Energy Policy and Technology (ICEPT) on the future role of electricity storage, before the topic became quite so popular.

He is now Deputy Director of Energy Research at the University of Oxford and leads a research theme on Flexibility. He also holds an EPSRC Fellowship and runs the Meter Study (http://www.energy-use.org) on the understanding of household electricity use dynamics.

Despite much of his work being inter-disciplinary, Phil is an engineer at heart and by background. Phil obtained his first degree in Business Engineering from Wedel, Germany. For 10 years he worked on advanced laser processes for the semiconductor and photovoltaic industry.

Venue

The seminars will be held in the Sutton Lecture Theatre, which is room 1.31 in the Royal School of Mines (building 9 on the campus map). The simplest route is to enter the building from Prince Consort Road and take the stairs on your left hand side up one flight. Step through the glass double doors on your left and the and the entrance to the lecture theatre is on your right.