Impact of Demand-Side Management on the Reliability of Generation Systems

The load shifting strategy is a form of demand side management program suitable for increasing the reliability of power supply in an electrical network. It functions by clipping the load demand that is above an operator-defined level, at which time is known as peak period, and replaces it at off-peak periods. The load shifting strategy is conventionally performed using the preventive load shifting (PLS) program. In this paper, the corrective load shifting (CLS) program is proven as the better alternative. PLS is implemented when power systems experience contingencies that jeopardise the reliability of the power supply, whereas CLS is implemented only when the inadequacy of the power supply is encountered. The disadvantages of the PLS approach are twofold. First, the clipped energy cannot be totally recovered when it is more than the unused capacity of the off-peak period. The unused capacity is the maximum amount of extra load that can be filled before exceeding the operator-defined level. Second, the PLS approach performs load curtailment without discrimination. This means that load clipping is performed as long as the load is above the operator-defined level even if the power supply is adequate. The CLS program has none of these disadvantages because it is implemented only when there is power supply inadequacy, during which the amount of load clipping is mostly much smaller than the unused capacity of the off-peak period. The performance of the CLS was compared with the PLS by considering chronological load model, duty cycle and the probability of start-up failure for peaking and cycling generators, planned maintenance of the generators and load forecast uncertainty. A newly proposed expected-energy-not-recovered (EENR) index and the well-known expected-energy-not-supplied (EENS) were used to evaluate the performance of proposed CLS. Due to the chronological factor and huge combinations of power system states, the sequential Monte Carlo was employed in this study. The results from this paper show that the proposed CLS yields lower EENS and EENR than PLS and is, therefore, a more robust strategy to be implemented.