A Demand Response (DR) experience due to financial issues in the Dominican Republic electricity market

This paper presents how the Dominican Republic Electricity Market has been addressing load management, switching the distribution system for financial control and energy loss reduction. This situation has generated among others several frequency stability issues in the power system and represents a real challenge for load estimation and centralized security assessment and dispatch. Distribution companies (DISCOS) manage the customer consumption programming and controlling time and duration of hundreds of distribution circuits to match the desire energy seeking profit optimization, actually most of the cases reducing the financial losses. Along with this situation, customers have implemented huge amount of DC/AC inverters, electric motor and other distributed generation. Thus, a new methodology to solve the dispatch problem in the Dominican Republic electricity market has been designed optimizing circuit management, utility profit and ensuring scheduled circuits for stability matters. The main contribution of this paper is that presents an approach for dealing with Demand Response and its effects on power system stability, which provides a first approach for a centralized economic dispatch solution considering demand response and distributed generation in the Dominican Republic electricity market.