Ontario heat wave gave demand-response programs first real test
Sunday, July 11th, 2010
I was in Vancouver last week, where the weather was perfect, so I dodged most of the hot, humid heatwave stuff that kept air conditioners blasting in the northeast. But I was watching Ontario’s power demand from afar and was happy to see that the electricity system handled the hot weather quite well. It was, in fact, the first time we got a sense of how well Ontario’s demand-response programs work. Last summer just wasn’t hot enough to give it a proper test run, but we found out last week that demand-response has an important role to play in the province. According to figures from the Independent Electricity System Operator, DR programs were able to reduce electricity use during the four-day heat wave by 3,000 megawatt-hours. Since we’re talking roughly 100 hours, that averages out to about 30 megawatts of capacity spared during the entire period. That’s a misleading figure, however, because the programs would only kick in during peak times. For example, at the height of the heat wave last Tuesday as much as 350 megawatts of load were reduced – the equivalent of a small coal-fired power plant. About 150 megawatts of that came from our Peaksaver program, which allows utilities to slightly reduce air conditioning load from participating customers. Another 200 megawatts came from the DR 3 program, which consists of industrial/commercial electricity users and aggregators that have agreed to reduce load when asked.
The cleanest megawatt is the one not used, and not using it is a hell of a lot cheaper than paying a natural gas peaker plant for peak supply.
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
