Study and comparison of demand response aggregation in Europe and USA

As the needs for more efficient and environmentally friendly energy production, distribution, and storage methods increases, the need for new technologies and systems to properly do it arises. One of the solutions to the efficiency problem is to actively operate the electric grid in order to maximize its efficiency, the set of technologies that enable this is called Smart Grid. The advent of renewable energy resources and distributed generation schemes, has brought with it a new set of challenges for the energy system actors. These challenges are related to the nature of the renewable energy resources and may cause problems in the technical level, for example with the supply, such as voltage and frequency deviations, as well as in the administrative level, for example, how the power system operator would manage the myriad of new customers with very different generation profiles. In order to combat these problems, the methodology of demand response and the figure of the aggregator have been introduced in the electrical systems. In this thesis the concept of demand response aggregators will be a studied, as well as the regulations that apply to it, the markets in which it intervenes, the way that it is implemented in several counties in Europe and states in the USA, and how it has been dealt with and implemented in Italy.