A survey industrial electricity users found that almost 90% are interested in earning revenue from demand-side response, but many fear disruption to operations and believe that their business processes are incompatible with DSR.
Energyst Media’s 2016 Demand-Side Response polled more than 200 end users from public and private sector organisations to gauge their views on DSR. Around three quarters (73%) of those polled do not currently participate in DSR. Of those non-providers, 87% said they would be interested if it did not affect their operations. Fear of disruption (cited by 37%) and a belief that their equipment and processes are not suitable (39%), were the main reasons that respondents had not considered DSR participation.
Mark Fitchett, head of electricity procurement at Ineos-owned chemicals firm Inovyn, which participates in DSR in six of its eight European markets, but does very little in the UK. Fitchett said in the Energyst’s report that’s because, along with Germany, “the UK is the markets where the value is lowest”, adding that the market signals need to be simple and clear if DSR is to scale.
He continued:” If DSR is about making small embedded generators centrally dispatchable to National Grid – that is great. But it isn’t demand flexibility. And the economics of those two and the models that you need are very different. We run a big site and yet my manufacturing manager doesn’t like doing this, because it could be putting his job at risk and his job is to make chemicals. So you have to be going with a value proposition and a risk proposition and that is a difficult sell.“
The report, sponsored by National Grid, Dong Energy, Enernoc, Kiwi Power, Open Energi, Restore and SmartestEnergy, is available as a free download at: theenergyst.com/dsr.
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