Abstract
Demand-side solutions are one of the most important customer-dependent options among innovative smart grid technologies. Flexible loads can be controlled and coordinated in several ways to operate in favor of the grid. Contrary to conventional participators in grid services, responding to grid requests is not the primary objective of the owners of demand-side resources. Therefore, it is a vital task for demand side service operators to provide maximized and reliable participation. However, motivation factors may vary due to demographic characteristics of the society and there are important diversities due to cultural differences of countries. This study investigates consumer expectations, preferences and concerns on demand response (DR) and deployable gamification techniques in Turkey. A detailed survey is conducted with individuals and results are analyzed to evaluate general trends together with distinctive customer patterns.

Abstract
In future power grids, a large integration of renewable energy sources is foreseen, which will impose serious technical challenges to system operators. To mitigate some of the problems that renewable energy sources may bring, new voltage and frequency control strategies must be developed. Given the expected evolution of technologies and information systems, these new strategies will benefit from increasing system observability and resources controllability, enabling a more efficient grid operation. The ELECTRA IRP project addressed the new challenges that future power systems will face and developed new grid management and control functionalities to overcome the identified problems. This work, implemented in the framework of ELECTRA, presents an innovative functionality for the control room of the cell operator and its application in assistance with the voltage control designed for the Web-of-Cells. The voltage control method developed uses a proactive mode to calculate the set-points to be sent to the flexible resources, each minute, for a following 15-min period. This way, the voltage control method developed is able to mitigate voltage problems that may occur, while, at the same time, contributes to reduce the energy losses. To enable a straightforward utilization of this functionality, a user interface was created for system operators so they can observe the network state and control resources in a forthright manner accordingly.

Abstract
Strong adoption dynamics of private passenger electric vehicles (EV) will require adjustments in the operation and planning of electrical distribution grids. This work proposes a novel approach to assess the impact of electric vehicle charging while considering EV adoption dynamics and commuting patterns. The proposed model uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and is applied to a real-world case study. Results suggest that clustering of EV charging will occur and underline the relevance of accurate spatial and temporal charging pattern estimations for distribution grid planning. Overloading of distribution network elements was observed even under light EV penetration rates.

Abstract
Integration of aggregated demand response into the wholesale electricity market is an emerging field of research. Contrary to conventional service providers, most of the demand side participants act voluntarily. However, due to wholesale market regulations, reliable and effective participation of huge numbers of customers is a vital task for aggregators. The existing retail programs aim to motivate customers to take part in events in return for static or individual performance-based incentives. These programs do not focus on engaging customers to act in a collaborative way and therefore have limited effectiveness. This study proposes a novel retail demand response program in which the incentives are dependent on the aggregated performance of participants. Considering the existing wholesale and retail market structures together with demand response aggregator responsibilities, an adaptable program is developed for more effective performance and indirect collaboration of customers. The contribution of the program is compared with a number of different DR programs adopting concepts from game theory.

Abstract
This paper proposes a two-stage stochastic optimization model to support an aggregator of prosumers in the definition of bids for the day-ahead energy and secondary reserve markets. The aggregator optimizes the prosumers' flexibility with the objective of minimizing the net cost of buying and selling energy and secondary reserve in both day-ahead and real-time market stages. The uncertainties of the renewable generation, consumption, outdoor temperature, prosumers' preferences, and house occupancy are modeled through a set of scenarios. For a case study of 1000 prosumers, the results show that the proposed bidding strategy reduces the costs of both aggregator and prosumers by 40% compared to a bidding strategy typically used by retailers.

Abstract
Optimizing the participation of a large number of prosumers in the electricity markets is a challenging problem, especially for portfolios with thousands or millions of flexible resources. To address this problem, this paper proposes a cluster-based optimization approach to support an aggregator in the definition of demand and supply bids for the day-ahead energy market. This approach consists of two steps. In the first step, the aggregated flexibility of the entire portfolio is computed by a centroid-based clustering algorithm. In the second step, the supply and demand bids are defined by an optimization model that can assume the form of a deterministic or a two-stage stochastic problem. A case study of 10,000 prosumers from the Iberian market is used to evaluate and compare the performance of the bidding optimization models with and without pre-clustering. The numerical results show that the optimized bidding strategies outperform an inflexible strategy by more than 20% of cost savings. The centroid-based clustering algorithm reduces effectively the execution times of the bidding optimization problems, without affecting the quality of the energy bids.