By Le Xie
I attended Bonneville Power Administration (BPA)'s research roadmap workshop on demand response on Sep 18-19, 2014. BPA runs a research portfolio that covers transmission, hydro power, demand response, etc. It was good to see that a utility takes serious efforts on defining research roadmap on demand response.
A few take away from the workshop:
(1) Aggregation of flexible demand is the key. For example, as a bulk power system operator, BPA will be interested in pilot demand response only if it can offer at least 5MW capacity, and will be interested in actual participation from demand response only if it can offer at least 25MW capacity.
(2) Baselining demand response programs have received a lot of attention. Unless we know the otherwise level of demand, it would be difficult to value the flexible demand. There was a very good article by H. P. Chao on this topic. Also, this very website and our initiative on empirical study would hopefully provide some food for thought on this topic.
(3) It was hotly debated on what should be a good business model for benefit sharing among bulk power system operators (e.g. BPA) and distribution-level utilities. The ongoing activities at Texas retail-level market seem to be a very good case study. S. Puller has published some good work about the empirical study of retail-level demand response.
<Disclaimer> The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not
necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any agency of the U.S. government.
I attended Bonneville Power Administration (BPA)'s research roadmap workshop on demand response on Sep 18-19, 2014. BPA runs a research portfolio that covers transmission, hydro power, demand response, etc. It was good to see that a utility takes serious efforts on defining research roadmap on demand response.
A few take away from the workshop:
(1) Aggregation of flexible demand is the key. For example, as a bulk power system operator, BPA will be interested in pilot demand response only if it can offer at least 5MW capacity, and will be interested in actual participation from demand response only if it can offer at least 25MW capacity.
(2) Baselining demand response programs have received a lot of attention. Unless we know the otherwise level of demand, it would be difficult to value the flexible demand. There was a very good article by H. P. Chao on this topic. Also, this very website and our initiative on empirical study would hopefully provide some food for thought on this topic.
(3) It was hotly debated on what should be a good business model for benefit sharing among bulk power system operators (e.g. BPA) and distribution-level utilities. The ongoing activities at Texas retail-level market seem to be a very good case study. S. Puller has published some good work about the empirical study of retail-level demand response.
<Disclaimer> The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not
necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any agency of the U.S. government.