13 April 2026
A new paper shows that demand response, which allows electricity consumption to shift in response to price signals, can significantly lower the cost of decarbonizing power systems in the Global South. The research by a cross-country team of MCET Network researchers in Chile, Vietnam, and Colombia also found demand response increased the share of renewables in the generation mix.
Using an iterative demand response module built into the open-source Switch model, the authors analyzed the power systems of all three countries through to 2050. Across every scenario, demand response:
- lowered total system costs (by nearly 36% in Chile’s high-renewables scenario)
- reduced the need for new generation, storage, and transmission investment
- pushed up renewable participation
By unlocking demand-side flexibility, demand response also enabled higher electricity consumption, pointing to opportunities for deeper electrification and broader economic development.
The paper Demand Response in Decarbonizing Power Systems: Evidence from Chile, Colombia, and Vietnam is a clear example of the South-South, cross-institutional collaboration the RESET Network is built to support. The team is led by Vinken, the MCET Chile team, and includes Manuel Portilla-Paveri, María José Galilea, Nicolás Lobos, and Matías Negrete-Pincetic (Vinken / PUC Chile), Doan Thi Thanh Thuy (Fulbright University Vietnam), and Camilo Herrera (Universidad de los Andes, Colombia). It was produced with support from the 2025 MCET Small Grants Program and is published in EDF’s Economics Discussion Paper series.
You can watch a presentation about the findings of this paper here (starting around 48 minutes in).