1.Key Laboratory of Control of Power Transmission and Conversion, Ministry of Education (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Shanghai 200240, China;2.Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago 60616, USA

In the new power systems dominated by renewable energy resources, the regulation capacity on the power generation side is significantly reduced. It is urgent to unlock the flexibility of the demand-side resources and make up for the system regulation shortage caused by integration of renewable energy resources. First, it is pointed out that the demand response mechanism for the new power systems should have the four characteristics of “scalable, permanent, lightweight, and attractive”. Then, in view of the problem that the current demand response classification method is rough and difficult to reflect its essential characteristics, according to the classification principles of customer contribution evaluation methods in the demand response, the existing mechanisms are reclassified into three types of the price-based demand response, the customer baseline load-based demand response, and the customer directrix load-based demand response. The research status of various mechanisms is introduced in detail. Moreover, based on the proposed four characterized features, the analysis points out that it is difficult for the price-based and customer baseline load-based mechanisms to adapt to the development of new power systems. Different from these two types of mechanisms, which try to indirectly change the user’s electricity consumption behavior by using a certain signal, the customer directrix load-based demand response directly depicts the profiles of the users’ load curves expected by the demand response implementers, which can better meet the four characterized features. It fundamentally overcomes the problems of other mechanisms such as small scale, unsustainable, opaque, and easy to rebound, and can be well adapted to the development needs of the new power systems. Finally, the necessity, feasibility and importance of the customer directrix load-based demand response mechanism in the development of new power systems are prospected.