Lessons learned from European pilot projects: Recommendations on market access requirements for electricity consumers

As more and more European citizens will move to cities over the next decades, the dynamics of urbanisation will result in an increase of energy demand and CO2 emissions. The utilisation of renewable energy technologies will support to reduce the impacts of climate change and lead to a paradigm shift of the energy system. But only additional efforts will ensure security of energy supply. The concepts of Demand Side Management (DSM) and Demand Response (DR) offer new opportunities to face these challenges. DSM can be understood as a portfolio of measures aiming at the direct influence of electricity consumption, e.g. energy demand shifting from peak to off-peak times, energy efficiency measures etc. On the other hand, the consumer´s reaction can be summarised as DR. This means that incentivising the consumer monetarily - by changing the electricity price - leads to a change in energy demand. Major infrastructure investments in the European electricity grid are needed to keep up stability of energy supply. DSM has the potential to ease this pressure that the electricity market is technically and economically experiencing. But to fully tap the potential of DSM, European member states need to overcome current regulatory barriers and appropriate DR programs need to be implemented. Following up on these the following research questions will be answered in this thesis: - Which kind of market access requirements need to be provided to electricity consumers in order to attract them accessing the energy market? - What `good practice´ examples of DSM operator models can be identified in the pilot projects (e.g. pooling, aggregators, virtual power plant etc.)?