PowerWeb Institute lunch lecture: Unlocking the DER ‘coordination dividend’

By: David Shipworth, Professor of Energy and the Built Environment at the UCL Energy Institute 

There is good evidence of a ‘coordination dividend’ in power systems with high levels of distributed energy resources which depends on the coordination of those resources towards agreed common-good objectives. This lecture reviews mechanisms for coordination of both privately held and community owned DER assets, from direct power-systems control - through legal contracts and market mechanisms - to voluntary agreements, and the comparative risks and benefits of using each to realise this ‘coordination dividend’. 

From this perspective, resolving such conflicting constraints can lead to better system level outcomes. One mechanism to do this is through  extensions of the companion modelling approach (Étienne 2014) developed in the field of environmental resource management. Companion modelling uses empirical social research to create multiple system representations through which different stakeholder groups provide real uses’ responses to inform agent based models of distributed resource management. These offer an approach to construction of empirically grounded computer simulations of DER owners’ responses under different market and regulatory environments.

Additionally, through use of behavioural science methods embedded in  stakeholder consultation and co-design processes, they constitute a consensus forming mechanism through which stakeholders can converge on common good objectives for DER asset-rich power systems to deliver. This lecture draws on discrete areas of research strength across TU Delft and UCL into a possible programme of research collaboration on the implementation of high DER asset decarbonised electrical power systems.