Evaluating Demand Response Programs: Getting the Key Performance Indicators Right

Demand Response (DR) has recently garnered great attention, with many DR programs being deployed and evaluated worldwide. They are hailed as a significant benefit enabled by the Smart Grid and an efficient method to engage consumers in managing their energy usage and reduce environmental impact and costs. But while the opportunities are great, challenges still remain to exploit the untapped potential of DR. Due to the many diverse technological and social contexts where is applied, establishing a common framework for evaluating DR programs is a rather complex but essential task in order to design more efficient and easily adopted, by utilities and users, DR programs. In this paper, we apply in practice some of, already defined in literature, Key Performance Indicators, aiming to evaluate different DR programs and we assess their applicability. In that context, we present and discuss initial results from two indicative trial sites (residential and commercial) and provide suggestions for future DR designers. Finally, we introduce the DR dashboard, a way to get an overview of a DR system and visualize the indices calculated in each trial site.