Industrial demand response uses a multitude of energy flexibility measures. Their planning and control requires various production IT systems. A widely accepted approach to classify these inhouse IT systems are the levels of the automation pyramid in companies. This paper broadens the scope of this concept to overcome the limitation to companies’ (virtual) borders by including required IT systems that refine and monetarize a company’s energy flexibility, e.g. energy markets, aggregators, etc. Therefore, a holistic approach for the classification of functionalities for industrial demand response across companies and energy markets is developed and applied exemplarily.
Sector coupling (SC) describes the concept of a purposeful connection and interaction of energy sectors to increase the flexibility of supply, demand, and storing. While SC is linked to research on smart energy system and locates itself in the research stream of 100% renewable energy systems, it currently focusses on counteracting challenges of temporal energy balancing induced by the intermittent feed-in of renewable energy sources. As regarding the coupling of grids, SC currently remains within classical energy grids. It does not exploit the coupled sectors’ potential to its full extent and, hence, lacks a holistic view. To include this view, we call on the use of all grids from coupled sectors for spatial energy transportation, resulting in an infrastructural system. By using the different loss structures of coupled grids, we illustrate how a holistic view on SC minimizes transportation losses. We argue that SC should include all grids that transport whichever type of energy (e.g., even transportation or communication grids). Ultimately, we derive and discuss implications relevant for policy makers and research: We illustrate why regulation and market design should be aligned in a way that the resulting incentives within and across the different sectors support climate change goals.