  With the expansion of renewable energies in Germany, imminent grid congestion
events occur more often. One approach for avoiding curtailment of renewable
energies is to cover excess feed-in by demand response. As curtailment is often
a local phenomenon, in this work we determine the regional demand response
potential for the 401 German administrative districts. The load regionalisation
is based on weighting factors derived from population and employment
statistics, locations of industrial facilities, etc. Using periodic and
temperature-dependent load profiles and technology specific parameters, load
shifting potentials were determined with a temporal resolution of 15 minutes.
Our analysis yields that power-to-heat technologies provide the highest
potentials, followed by residential appliances, commercial and industrial
loads. For the considered 2030 scenario, power-to-gas and e-mobility also
contribute a significant potential. The cumulated load increase potential of
all technologies ranges from $5 - 470~MW$ per administrative district. The
median value is $25~MW$, which would suffice to avoid the curtailment of 8
classical wind turbines. Further, we calculated load shifting cost-potential
curves for each district. Industrial processes and power-to-heat in district
heating have the lowest load shifting investment cost, due to the largest
installed capacities per facility. We distinguished between different size
classes of the installed capacity of heat pumps, yielding $23\%$ lower average
investment cost for heat pump flexibilisation in the city of Berlin compared to
a rural district. The variable costs of most considered load shifting
technologies remain under the average compensation costs for curtailment of
renewable energies of $110~\text{\euro{}}/MWh$. As all results and the
developed code are published under open source licenses, they can be integrated
into energy system models.
