It is widely acknowledged that demand response must play an increasingly important role in future electricity markets. This is as much due to increasing demand for air-conditioning as it is due to the changing sources of generation. In the National Electricity Market (NEM) in Australia, for just 3% of the year demand increases by 20%, or the equivalent of the generation from the two largest coal fired power stations combined. Over smaller regions and time intervals demand spikes are larger. Air-conditioning demand response takes advantage of a buildings inherent thermal storage to reduce electricity demand at peak times with no discernible impact on the indoor operating environment. Here we estimate the existing potential of commercial and residential air-conditioning systems to provide demand response across Australia. We use a top-down approach based on disaggregation of electricity substation half-hourly data. Results are that peak (i.e. 99.5th percentile) demand on the NEM could be reduced by up to 5.8% or 1.2 GW with the time of day at which the peak occurs delayed by approximately 2 hours. Based on the timing of the available capacity, both residential and commercial buildings are suited to providing air-conditioning demand response.

众所周知，需求响应必须在未来的电力市场中发挥越来越重要的作用。这既是由于对空调的需求增加，也是由于发电来源的变化。在澳大利亚的国家电力市场（NEM）中，每年仅3％的需求增长了20％，或相当于两个最大的燃煤电站发电量的总和。在较小的区域和时间间隔内，需求峰值较大。空调需求响应利用建筑物固有的蓄热优势来减少高峰时段的电力需求，而不会对室内运行环境产生明显影响。在这里，我们估算了商业和住宅空调系统在提供整个澳大利亚需求响应方面的潜力。我们使用基于变电站半小时数据分解的自顶向下方法。结果是，随着一天中峰值出现时间的延迟大约2个小时，NEM的峰值（即99.5个百分位数）需求最多可减少5.8％或1.2 GW。根据可用容量的时间安排，住宅和商业建筑均适合提供空调需求响应。