Place: Room 621, GP South (Building 78)
Time: Thursday 2nd Nov, 10:30 morning Tea, 11:00am seminar
Title: Quantifying the market benefits of CSIRO's Demand side management technology
Speaker: Ariel Liebman, Research Fellow, ACCS
Abstract:
Recent years have seen increasing growth in electricty demand throughout Australia. This growth has been driven by strong economic growth and is forecast to continue. To complicate matters the market penetration of reverse cycle air-conditioners has lead to an increase in peak demand both in summer and in winter. This growth is putting the transmission and distributin networks under stress and is also increasing the financial risk exposure of electricity trading companies such as Energex and Ergon Energy.
One of the approaches to manage this problem is known as Demand side management (DSM), where the energy usage of a number of customers is modified to reduce the levels of the peaks. Another exciting application of DSM is that it has the potential to facilitate increased penetration of intermittent renewable generators such as wind turbines. Such intermittent generators are usually seen as presenting a challenge to the maintenance of system stability.
One of the challenges of DSM technology is the ability to do collectively and reliably reduce load with a large number of customers (1000's of customers or more). The CSIRO's Energy Technology Division in conjunction with their Information and Communication Technology division has developed an multi-agent based approach to addressing the scalability problem for this technology. This talk describes the pilot stages of a collaboration between the CSIRO and the ACCS in quantifying the economic benefits of this technology. So far the quantification focuses on the financial benefits to an energy retailer which is able to exercise the demand side management to reduce exposure to electricty market prices. We intend to extending the modelling the broader economic benefit of this technology such as the reduction in system expansion costs.
