ABSTRACT
The use of the internet as a communications medium for energy management has increased substantially over the past decade. With improved reliability and availability, the internet has expanded into mainstream business and residential life, and data transmission speeds have dramatically increased while the costs have come down. By harnessing this information revolution, the electric power sector can be made more efficient through web-enabled metering and control for demand response (DR) on the grid. This can help keep electricity costs low, improve grid security and power quality, and offer new services not previously available through the power utility. Historically, electric utilities were motivated by regulatory commissions to construct more systems, as they could recoup all such costs through (almost automatic) rate increases. Today, the demand for electricity has outstripped the ability to economically generate and distribute power, and the public no longer wants to see new transmission lines and generators next door. In competitive electricity markets, new independent system operators (ISOs) have developed DR programs to influence users to better utilize those same assets in competitive electricity markets. To make this happen, an integration of demand response technologies with more traditional energy efficiency techniques has occurred, with the web being a natural means of allowing high speed communication and control. Advanced metering will become the norm in the coming decades, due to improvements in price-performance, regulatory push, and a cyclic investment in metering (especially given half the world lacks electricity today). A convergence is emerging of past energy management experience, new metering and hardware, and new DR grid programs aimed at encouraging avoidance of peak demand during critical or expensive periods. In this chapter, we provide some of the methods and procedures for control, and future projections of the direction of DR in fine tuning asset usage and operating costs.
