Demand Side Management and Transactive Energy Strategies for Smart Cities

Today’s cities have multiple networks and stakeholders tasked with meeting the district’s thermal and electrical demands, which is becoming an increasingly complex task. The Paris agreement and United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) necessitate sustainable solutions that improve energy efficiency while providing insight on strategic placement of new infrastructure without requiring wholesale changes in the existing networks. Demand-Side Management (DSM) has risen up as a strong candidate that satisfies these goals. DSM comprises of many strategies that operate at varying temporal, systemic, and societal levels, and are expected to enable demand satisfaction, stakeholder enfranchisement, and revenue generation while also improving grid efficiency and predictability. This chapter aims to highlight the different and often conflicting impulses within the energy systems of modern cities and propose how they may be put together to strike a delicate balance. The chapter will also list the different strategies and paradigms within energy management and break down the prerequisites to convert energy management from a novel idea to a ubiquitous concept seen across the world that incentivizes and empowers both the grid and the people at large. Finally, a small summary of existing barriers that prevent the implementation, as well as some possible solutions and future lines of research, will be discussed.