Edison Foundation
Lee Evans is Director Load Flexibility and Economics at Southern Company.
More than a dozen thought leaders and decision makers took the stage at the Edison Foundation's Institute for Electric Innovation's 13th annual Powering the People event in Washington D.C. Enjoy these excerpts.
Lee Evans: Yes, there's a lot there. The resource planners and the operators. The easiest way to get load flexibility to count is to know that the response is there and it's going to show up. People have described this as a leap of faith at first. I think that's too simplistic.
I don't think it's a leap of faith. I think it's just more detailed planning and analysis that needs to accompany it. One of the things that Southern Company has started doing with our very large programs is modeling them like a resource now, through our reserve margin models. Those resources have energy profiles, have response rates, and we run those through just like we would a supply-side resource.
Based on that, we're putting demand-side resources on a more equal playing field. That's an evolution that we've not done with such advanced modeling before. It used to be a more simplistic measurement and planning around these because for decades we rarely needed them.