Mobilizing the Anti-Duck Brigade: Technology and Market Pathways for Load-Shifting Demand Response in California

With rapidly increasing renewable power generation, the California electricity system is experiencing the impacts of the so-called "duck curve," with occasional over-generation in the middle of the day, followed by rapid ramping of net demand producing a sharp evening peak. Mitigating this pattern will require novel demand-side management approaches to shifting demand away from high net demand periods and toward high renewables generation periods. In this paper, drawing from more than 200,000 individual residential, commercial, and industrial customers' hourly smart meter data, we disaggregate load shapes for certain key end-uses and then average the results across a highly granular set of customer segments by sector, building type, demand profile and geographic region, to yield a library of characteristic daily load profiles ("clusters") for different end-uses and seasons. By categorizing the library into particularly desirable or undesirable load shapes in the context of mitigating the duck curve, we can gain insight into specific technologies, seasonal effects, or site-level attributes that may serve as helpful levers to use in developing future load-shifting programs. Based on these insights, we develop recommendations on technologies and new market structures and incentives that can create a future demand curve that more closely matches renewable generation patterns.