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What is Demand Response?

The charge towards Korea’s clean energy future has created the need for new forms of power capacity to ensure the reliability of the power grid while balancing the natural variability of renewable power. Demand Response is one of the best options for balancing renewables. The Korea Power Exchange (KPX) allows Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) to offer Demand Response through a market mechanism to ensure the stability and sustainability of the power grid. Our VPP allows energy users to offer Demand Response into the wholesale electricity market and to get paid for doing so.

How does it work?

1

Grid need

The Korea Power Exchange (KPX) balances the supply and demand of electricity in real-time. When demand is very high relative to the available supply, and close to reserve capacity of 6,500MW, the KPX will issue a ‘Demand Response Dispatch’ notice to aggregators, indicating that the power grid is under stress and there is a need for dispatchable capacity to support the system.
2

VPP is called

Enel X’s Virtual Power Plant (VPP) is called on, who aggregates its customer’s energy load or distributed energy assets made up of onsite equipment, backup generation assets, and battery energy storage solutions across businesses in Korea. Enel X offers its portfolio’s capacity to the KPX as a new source of power supply during these critical times.
3

Customer responds

Customers across Korea either reduce or modify energy usage when called on. This makes their power flexibility available to the KPX, by implementing power modulation plans.
4

Earn regular payments

Customers receive regular payments for both their availability to provide the service, and for when their power is provided to support the grid.  
1

Normal Demand Response

To manage electricity supply in case of an emergency, load curtailment can be requested by the KPX if the reserve power level is in the “preparation” or “notice” stages (less than 6.5 GW of electricity demand reserve available), to reduce demand on the system.

 

With this program, businesses respond to the grid signal for 1 to 4 hours, with three to five mandatory events of curtailment per year.

2

Voluntary Dispatch Hours

There are other Demand Response programs where participation is voluntary. These include Economic, Peak Demand and Fine-dust Demand Response, which can be done without a request for demand reduction by the KPX.

  • Economic: Businesses who participate in the Reliability program can also participate in voluntary bidding to compete with the generation price from power generation plants.
  • Peak: Businesses can curtail their load when power supply is expected to exceed the standard level of demand due to winter and summer peak usages and earn revenue.
  • Fine-dust: Businesses can curtail their load due to the emission of fine-dust caused by coal generation and be rewarded.
     

If your business is enrolled in Normal Demand Response, you can opt-in to any Voluntary Dispatch Hours of your choice at any time of day, which we manage on your behalf.

3

Under-frequency Demand Response (UFR)

Under-frequency Demand Response is is a program where businesses reduce the demand for electricity immediately when the supply and demand of electricity is unstable and a frequency drop occurs.

When the grid frequency drops below a certain frequency (59.85 Hz in the first phase and 59.65 Hz in the second phase), demand resources automatically reduce their electricity consumption for 10 minutes and are compensated by selling the reduced electricity consumption to the energy market.

 

Contact our team to learn which programs would best suit your business.

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Our services

Our market-leading and comprehensive service offering includes:

Why Enel X?

1

We are the global market leader

Businesses trust our proven track record as the market leader. Enel X manages the largest world’s largest C&I VPP, with over 9.4 GW of Demand Response resources. Our ambition is to grow this to 10.6 GW by 2023. More than 15,000 global enterprises are doing Demand Response with us across 11 countries today.
2

Demonstrated local leadership

Korea was an early mover within APAC in opening its power market to the participation of VPP and Demand Response resources. Today, Korea is Enel X's second largest Demand Response market in the world.
3

Global innovation, local execution

We bring our global leading platforms to local markets. We unlock new opportunities to decarbonize, digitalize and electrify your energy use in ways that will help grow your business.

 

We manage 105 MW of behind-the-meter Battery Energy Storage installed capacity globally today. We are also growing our world-leading electric mobility footprint, with 25,000 public charging points worldwide.

4

Future plans for electrification

The government is continuing to drive green reforms such as banning the registration of new combustion engine buses from 2024 onwards.

We see great opportunity for growth and value creation in the local market in the electrification of transportation and vehicle-to-grid technology, BESS, distributed energy generation, and more.

Intersection X

Speak with an expert today to learn how Enel X can help you achieve your energy goals.