An Integrated Load Forecasting-Load Management Simulator: Its Design and Performance

Load management is now a widely practiced option among electric utilities in the United States. As the capital cost for power plant construction has skyrocketed, and the load growth has slowed, the utility industry has found inexpensive capacity through load management. Now, as the load growth is slowly picking up, and the incremental benefit from additional load management activities is diminishing, the capacity (MW) for bulk power purchase is getting more and more expensive. This situation has been aggravated by the proliferation of cogeneration activities in various parts of the country. While cogenerators may be able to supply significant amounts of energy (MWhr), quite often they depend on the electric utility to provide the backup capacity (MW). Consequently the utility supplied peak load capacity has a very low load factor and, therefore, becomes very expensive. Deeply involved in this situation are the electric cooperatives who buy bulk power from electric utilities and resell to their member consumers. A number of such cooperatives (e.g., Old Dominion Electric Cooperative in Virginia) are experiencing load growth higher than what is generally seen among investor-owned electric utilities. This has resulted in higher demand for capacity (MW) by the electric cooperatives while the cost for such capacity has shot up due to the reasons mentioned earlier. The coalescence of these factors have resulted in the necessity on the part of electric cooperative to exercise load control at appropriate times.