Demand response has become the main focus of this consulting practice over the past three years. Demand response is a tool for reducing peak demand, balancing the electric grid, managing transmission congestion, and reducing cost. Additionally, demand response offers the potential to help integrate intermittent renewable generation coming onto the electric grid.
Regulators are calling for greater quantities of demand response in both retail and wholesale markets. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has been crafting market rules that put demand response on a basis essentially comparable with generation dispatch.
Demand response is competing in capacity markets at a cost per kW curtailed that can be lower than the cost of generating that kW. As it has become a viable resource on par with generation, grid operators are integrating demand response into their daily operations. Utilities are incorporating demand response into their system planning.
Utilities at ISO New England and PJM are expected to bid both demand response and their energy efficiency portfolios into wholesale forward capacity markets. Not every utility or state is prepared to respond strategically given complicated and changing rules for qualification, bidding, reconfiguration auctions, bilateral contracting and measurement and verification.
Electricity markets will continue to evolve to allow even greater quantities of demand response and energy efficiency to compete in more wholesale markets. FERC Chairman Wellinghoff’s vision of a supra-region electric grid with large amounts of demand response rests on an accurate accounting of this resource. Reliable measurement and verification imposes transaction costs on resource providers. M&V involves the counter-factual; it is necessary to estimate how much power would have been consumed in the absence of curtailment. Estimates of baseline consumption need to be created to estimate savings. Baselines have become the most complex and contentious element of M&V.
FERC has stated an intention to pursue additional market reforms in 2013 and beyond. On February 21, 2013 FERC approved M&V standards prepared by the North American Energy Standards Board that Ryn Hamilton Consulting helped craft. FERC intends to eliminate remaining barriers to integration and respond to concerns among market participants that the rules be fair to all.
Demand response training and presentations:
ISO-New England forward capacity market certification. Completed training in ISO-NE’s FCM that included qualification, critical path scheduling, supplemental auctions, bilateral contracting, resource registration, performance testing and settlement. 2011.
Energy, Utility and Environment Conference. Sponsored and presented at the Demand Response session on the topic of demand response baselines, January 28-30, 2013.
Association of Energy Services Professionals. Moderated a webinar on the integration of demand response with other demand-side resources, “IDSM Developments and Early Lessons”, May 2012.
EUEC Conference. Co-presented a paper with Southern California Edison, “EM&V Variations Across Jurisdictions”, January 29, 2011.
AESP Webinar. Moderated a webinar, “NAESB Standards for Measurement and Verification of Demand Response”, November 10, 2011.
Peak Load Management Association Conference. Moderated a session on alternative demand response methodologies, “Monitoring and Verification for Demand Response”, November 9, 2010.