Abstract:
Utilities around the world are now considering Demand Side Management (DSM) in
their strategic planning. The costs of constructing and operating a new capacity
generation unit are increasing everyday, which force the utilities to search for another
alternative without any additional constraints on customers comfort level or quality of
delivered product. DSM encompasses a broad range of utility initiated activities to
encourage end users to willingly modify their electricity consumption without any
impact on service quality or customer satisfaction. It was found that an objective
function reflecting the user electricity expenses did widely serve the best for both the
electric utility as well as the end user. From a utility point of view, benefits are
meterized as freed capacity, deferred investment or increased revenues. Other
developed target objective functions such as maximizing the load factor or the utility
revenues did serve to achieve its targets but without much impact on end user electricity
expenses or even increased ones. From the customer's point of view, the objective is to
decrease the amount of electricity bill. The main target of this paper is to derive a
mathematical formulation for different DSM programs that can be designed subject to
the different problems that may face the utilities, operators and engineers.