The European energy transition increasingly requires flexibility to ensure reliable operation of the electricity system, making use of demand response, a promising concept. With technological advances in the fields of big data analysis and the internet of things, small- and medium-sized prosumers could also provide flexibility services through aggregators. A lot of conceptual work has been conducted recently to formulate business models in this context, but their viability still remains unclear. In this paper, a quantitative validation is conducted of two business models that are frequently proposed in the scientific discussion. The aim of this work is to explore the economic limits of these business models and show under which conditions they can be profitable for small- and medium-sized prosumers. For this purpose, a multi-level contribution margin calculation for several scenarios, customer segments and target markets is conducted. The results show that the profitability for the participation of small loads is still very low under current market conditions. Especially for household consumers, transaction costs are too high to be covered by the revenues. Considering the quantitative results, in the future profitable business cases can only be expected for medium-sized tertiary consumers.
The Energy Service Directive (ESD) has pushed forward the issue of energy savings calculations without clarifying the methodological basis. Savings achieved in the Member States are calculated with rather non-transparent and hardly comparable Bottom-up (BU) methods. This paper develops the idea of parallel evaluation tracks separating the Member States’ issue of ESD verification and comparable savings calculations. Comparability is ensured by developing a standardised BU calculation kernel for different energy efficiency improvement (EEI) actions which simultaneously depicts the different calculation options in a structured way (e.g. baseline definition, system boundaries, double counting). Due to the heterogeneity of BU calculations the approach requires a central database where Member States feed in input data on BU actions according to a predefined structure. The paper demonstrates the proposed approach including a concrete example of application
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