The Ministry of Energy of the Russian Federation published a draft law on a target model for managing demand for electricity

The Russian Ministry of Energy has developed and published for public discussion a draft federal law aimed at introducing a target model of electricity demand management.

The project introduces a new type of services - services for managing changes in electricity consumption, as well as defines and secures the legal status of electricity consumption management aggregators. The adoption of the developed federal law will give the opportunity to make the electricity demand management mechanism an integral part of the wholesale electricity and capacity market, which will have a positive impact on price dynamics.

The development of the project is a continuation of the initiative to introduce the practice of managing the electricity demand in the UPS of Russia. As part of the initiative, in January 2017, a price-dependent consumption mechanism was launched for consumers of the wholesale electricity market, and in 2019-2020, a pilot project was carried out to involve retail market consumers in demand management by creating specialized organizations - demand management aggregators. The pilot project showed the efficiency of the principles laid down and caught great interest both of power companies and of electricity consumers.

During the pilot project, 70 aggregator companies took part in it, representing more than 300 control objects, all of which, in turn, consist of power receivers of one or several consumers. Over a year and a half, the capacity of resources for managing the demand of retail consumers has grown from 50 MW to 600 MW, and the number of regions where the project is present has exceeded 50.

After the Russian Government makes an appropriate decision, it is planned to extend the pilot project in 2021.