Growth Opportunities in the Asia-Pacific Demand Response Market, Forecast to 2025

The Asia-Pacific demand response market is in the growing stage with countries such as South Korea, Japan, and New Zealand in the forefront. The liberalization of electricity markets and increasing distributed energy resources have a major role in driving the growth of demand response. However, lack of standardized procedures and absence of incentives deter the market growth in most countries in the region. Australia and Singapore are other notable countries that are aiming to establish an effective DR system in the electricity markets. Countries such as Japan, Australia, and Singapore are still testing the impacts and feasibility of demand response. However, after 2020, the market is expected to grow strongly with the introduction of demand response for ancillary services in the power sector. Liberalization of the electricity sector is a major drive for demand response market in the region. Besides, aggregation of distributed resources, energy storage system installations are offering opportunities for demands response. Most countries in the region are test trialling demand response to understand the economic benefits of it to evaluate the necessary incentives to be proposed to promote customer participation. Demand response requires interoperability of DRMS, connected appliances or equipment, network operation center, and so on. This requires these components to be standardized to ensure effective communication between them. Lack of standardization hinders proper adoption of the technology and deters demand response growth. Key Asia-Pacific markets include South Korea, Japan, Australia, and Singapore. South Korea is leading the path with 3.88 GW in 2017. Emergency demand response constitutes the majority (approximately 70%) of the total demand response market. The Japanese, Australian, and Singaporean markets operate primarily in this model. Implicit DR pricing models can be expected to become popular during the next 5 years. With the integration of more resources under DR aggregation model, cloud-based DR or SaaS model is expected to become popular. This would make the integration of residential resources to the cloud much easier. Besides, DR emerges as a secondary revenue model for energy storage systems, which were installed for power quality improvement, renewable energy fluctuation mitigation, and so on.