Aggregation and management of the demand in a deregulated electricity market

The deregulation of electricity markets, now coming into force in several countries, has a strong impact on the behavior of electricity customers and stimulates the use of tools for increasing the flexibility of consumption, since markets encourage price responsive demand. Load management and customer aggregation can improve the role of demand within markets, if consumers are able to respond to price signals by handling load. This paper discusses the benefits of demand aggregation and load flexibility in a deregulated context, from the point of view of customers; in addition, an example of load management procedure based on neural networks is presented.