Initial assessment of voltage-led demand response from UK residential loads

One way of unlocking aggregated demand response without directly managing customers is to exploit the positive correlation between voltage and demand. This work presents an initial assessment of the potential residential response in UK primary substations (e.g., 33/11 or 33/6.6 kV) as part of the trial “Customer Load Active System Services (CLASS)” run by the distribution network operator Electricity North West Limited (ENWL). Two load modelling methodologies, time independent and time varying, are presented and applied to a single primary substation and then extended to the ENWL area. For the latter, the results considering the time-varying model, purely residential load, and 3% voltage reduction during a winter day show that it could be possible to achieve an aggregated peak reduction exceeding 150 MW (>3%). Although the two load models have shown strong agreement the latter is a more accurate alternative when demand response throughout the day is of particular interest.