Triggering Demand‒Side‒Management: Correlation of electricity prices, share of renewables, CO2‒contents, and grid‒frequency in the German electricity grid.

To provide a simple instrument to operate residential Load-Shifting or Demand-Side-Management systems, the measurement of the actual grid frequency seems to be an appropriate method. Due to the present inflexibility and the lack of sufficient throttling capabilities of lignite and nuclear power plants, a surplus of electricity generation occurs during periods of high wind and solar power generation. While the specific CO2- emission is decreasing then ‒ due to the increased share of Renewables, the grid frequency is increasing (to a certain limit). Using the grid frequency as an indicator to switch-on and off certain loads (loads that do not require power permanently (e.g. dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, fridges and freezers, heaters) could provide a simple, inexpensive demand-side management indicator to lower specific CO2‒emssions and costs (if a dynamic consumption tariff is available). To check the truthfulness of that hypothesis, the grid and frequency data of the German grid of the year 2018 have been collected and a the correlation between grid frequency, power surplus, share of renewables vs. CO2-contents and price at the European energy exchange (EEX) have been calculated. The results show: Correlation between frequency and share of renewables is quite low (r = 0.155) due to the fact that primary grid control quickly compensates deviations from the 50 Hz nominal frequency. There is a good anti-correlation (r = - 0.687) between the EEX‒prices and the share of renewables in the grid. Over the years, correlation between electricity trading prices (EEX) and CO2 emissions is quite good (r =0.665), within the one year (2018) that correlation almost doesn’t exist, possibly due to the inflexibility of the bulky lignite power plants that even operate at negative prices.