Understanding the impact of human & corporate behaviours on DSO planning

Future flexibility markets will require the participation of new entities, like aggregators and domestic customers. The activities of these entities will have an impact on regulators' market designs as well as Distributed Network Operator (DSO) operations. Existing simulation models fall short in capturing the effects of human behaviour from domestic customers or other actors such as aggregators on the system. The paper presents PyEMLab-Agg, a new agent-based modelling tool that has been created to incorporate impacts like human behaviour, contract and risk management, as well as business model selection. According to preliminary simulations, evaluating DSO flexibility markets without taking into account consumer sentiments and social interactions may result in an over or underestimation of average market pricing of between 20% and 50%. DSO’s that use the output of such a tool could improve their ability to host additional capacity on their systems.