Load management: impacts on the reliability and production costs of interconnected systems

Abstract With the increasing recognition that load management could be beneficial to a utility, the planner has an added alternative in generation expansion planning in deciding whether to construct a new plant, to purchase power from a neighbouring utility or to implement a load management scheme. This paper evaluates the impacts of load management strategies on the reliability as well as on the production costs of two interconnected systems. Investigation has been made to find the equivalence, in terms of reliability improvement and production cost benefit, between the tie-line capacity and the percentage reduction of the peak demand. In the simulation, the correlation between the loads of two inteconnected systems is considered. The segmentation method is utilized in the numerical simulation.