Until very recently, most utility customers–whether home or business owners–paid for electricity based on the amount they consumed over the course of the month, and were charged a flat fee for every kWh of electricity they used.
Because they run so infrequently, these power plants tend to be very inefficient and very expensive to operate from both a cost and environmental impact perspective.Īs a result, by reducing peak demand, we can reduce the need for–and costs associated with–these peaking power plants, generating electricity bill savings and reducing emissions at the same time. At the same time, utilities and grid operators also forecast peak demand over the next ten years to try to plan for future power needs and get started building power plants to meet that future need today.īut peak demand is important as more than just a planning tool–it’s a useful window into the way that the electricity grid works and the way that we pay for electricity, and also presents an opportunity for achieving significant, and quick, cost savings on the electric grid.īecause electricity is the only commodity that is produced at the exact same time that it is consumed (as Peter Kelly Detwiler points out in The Energy Switch), historically, grid operators have been required to keep around certain power plants that are only run during peak times, maybe for less than 40 hours per year. Utilities and grid operators forecast demand for every moment of every day and are very accurate at parsing weather forecasts to understand grid conditions for the next day to understand how much power will be required, when that day’s peak demand will occur, and how many power plants they’ll need to call to provide electricity during the day. They need to know how many power plants to have available at any given time on any given day to keep the grid up and running. Understanding peak demand is an important tool for utilities and grid operators. Typically, peak demand occurs on hot summer weekdays in the late afternoon, especially a couple of days into a heat wave: that’s when everyone is at work and air conditioning units are working their hardest to keep everyone cool during the heat of the day. Peak demand is the amount of capacity required during the single moment when the grid as a whole experiences the highest demand for power. Power requirements will vary from moment to moment for different appliances (i.e., is your refrigerator making ice or just keeping things cold?), meaning power demand will necessarily fluctuate over the course of each day and throughout the year to the grid as a whole. While usage focuses on how many kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity you use over a certain period of time, demand focuses on how much power a certain appliance or process requires at any given moment.
Peak demand represents the moment when demand is highest on the grid as a whole.Electricity consists of both demand (measured in watts) and consumption (measured in watt-hours).
0 kommentar(er)
