From controllable loads to generalized demand-side resources: A review on developments of demand-side resources

Demand response (DR) is regarded as an important method in the economic and secure operation of the power system, which has attracted great attentions from both industry and academia. With increasing integration of distributed energy resources (DER), demand-side resources become more active and diversified. Moreover, developments of the smart grid (SG) technology provide better environment for DR application. This paper presents an overview of demand-side resource developments from controllable loads to generalized demand-side resources (GDR) including distributed generation (DG) and electric energy storage (EES). Besides, aggregation technologies such as virtual power plant (VPP) and load aggregator (LA) are summarized here. Advantages of GDR application and its development prospects are presented at the end of the paper.