Decarbonising the global electricity sector through demand-side management: a critical and systematic review of policy responses

The current climate literature on long-term electricity decarbonisation is dominated by global scenarios from Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), which give special attention to supply-side solutions over demand-side technological options despite the broader range of co-benefits and lesser risk of the latter. To understand the recent state of the art, this study analyses one hundred and three empirical studies on policy instrument evaluations from 1994 to 2018. At first, we find a total of 809 research articles from Web of Science and Scopus databases and eventually analyse 103 empirical peer-reviewed studies based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria from 1994 to 2018. We find that demand-side policy studies are predominantly carried out in Asia, Europe and North America with the US contributing more than one-quarter of the studies reviewed, most of which were published after the president Trump’s withdrawal from Paris Agreement (PA). Three types of Demand-Side Management (DSM) are identified with 20 corresponding policy instruments based on six basic categories. Energy saving remains the reason for implementing DSM. Although these policy instruments are promising, they are not always implemented for emissions reduction. Demand-side solutions through policies need to be fully exploited to achieve carbon emission targets from electricity or the overall energy sector.