Forecasting the geographic distribution of demand reductions. Copyright © 2011 Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc.
Chris Gazze managed Consolidated Edison’s targeted demand side management program until November 2010. He’s now a senior inspector at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria. Madlen Massarlian is manager of energy efficiency programs at Con Edison.
As new energy efficiency programs proliferate, regulators increasingly will seek to use the associated demand reductions to reduce capital expenditures on new transmission and distribution assets. However, forecasting the expected geographic distribution of these demand reductions within the grid and integrating this information into a utility’s capital planning process is a challenging task.
Con Edison has included the effects of demand side management (DSM) in its capital planning process since 2003. Con Edison developed a methodology to forecast the geographic distribution—down to the network level—of expected peak load reductions from non-targeted energy efficiency programs. Our approach uses historical energy consumption patterns and demographic data, by service class and by network, to allocate the energy savings expected from the various efficiency programs operating in our service territory to individual networks. Then, composite load curves for each efficiency program are applied to calculate the coincident demand reductions at each network’s local peak.