Barriers to Widespread the Adoption of Electric Flexibility Markets: A Triangulation Approach

The electricity markets are changing across the world and one of the biggest changes is the widespread deployment of Distributed Energy Resources (DER). This paper analyses the barriers that hinder the proliferation of Local Flexibility Market (LFM) and Local Energy Market (LEM) platforms, where DER can participate through Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain technologies. After surveying the body of knowledge, interviewing experts and consulting end-users of pilot-buildings through questionnaires, the authors identified a comprehensive list of barriers that can be classified within the following main themes: (1) fit to current lifestyles, (2) administration, (3) standardization, (4) trust, (5) technical, and (6) costs, where each category has several sub-categories. Finally, the paper develops a categorization by their nature and finds a suitable distinction between socio-economical, technical and legal barriers. The taxonomy and the dataset with experts’ categorisation is publicly available in Zenodo for other researchers and interested audiences. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are no current research studies exploring in detail heterogeneous barriers posed from diverse backgrounds, and the degree each one of them affects the adoption of LFM.