EFFLOCOM

The EU/SAVE project EFFLOCOM started July 2002 and was completed June 2004. Project partners from five countries, Norway, Denmark, Finland, France and England have been working in the project. The results are based on specific studies and six national projects that were included as EFFLOCOM pilots. Additional information from Sweden has been provided via a Swedish subcontractor.

The project has been seeking solutions to remove barriers to energy efficiency through research on customer response to different market based customer services in deregulated markets.

From the load curve analyses, including studies of total system load as well as customer category hourly load profiles from six countries: Denmark, Finland, France, Norway, Sweden and UK (England and Wales) we have learned that:

• All the involved countries have quite high temperature sensitivities during spring and autumn, being the result of electric space heating. Some countries show positive temperature sensitivities during summer – a result of cooling and air conditioning.
• For all the involved countries the consumption is higher during winter than the other seasons. This can be explained by use of electric space heating and use of lighting during the cold and dark season. France and UK, that have moderate temperatures during winter, also show a much higher demand during colder seasons due to less restricted building codes, and fewer requirements for insulation standards of buildings.
• All the involved countries show a big difference in the day profiles for working days compared to weekends.
• All the involved countries show reduction in the load during nights. All countries have two high activity periods during working days, one in the morning and one during evening. No radical changes in temperature sensitivity, peak load profiles, utilisation factors and distribution of annual energy consumption caused by deregulation are found.
• A large potential for demand response/load management in the industrial and the residential sector are found for all the involved countries. Estimates of the sector vice potential is available only from the Nordic countries where about 10-20 % of the peak load is reducible on hourly basis provided that the needed technology and economical incentives are in place. The load duration curves for all countries show that 5 % peak load reduction could be achieved by concentrated demand response efforts in 20-75 hours.
• Peak load reduction in one Nordic country gains the whole region due to high degree of coincidence in the peak hours.

The project homepage.

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