Managing Demand; IT's Role in Demand Response

Thought Leadership - 10:50 am - 11:15 am

As more and more utilities move toward Smart Grid implementation, increasingly they are gaining the ability to manage and shape end customer demand with Demand Response techniques. Efficient demand response has been shown to have tremendous benefit for utility companies since having the demand peaks means eliminating the most costly, and therefore least efficient generating facilities and a 5% reduction in demand can yield a 50% reduction in cost. Managing demand across tens of thousands of customers and hundreds of thousands of devices however is tremendously complex and requires the usage of a Demand Response Management System (DRMS) in order to achieve the necessary control and efficiency.

Takeaways:

• As generation becomes more distributed, utilities need to become more efficient and eliminating peak demand is key to this 
• Efficient and effective demand management is tremendously complex and requires a fully integrated demand response management system 
• IT has a key role to play in gathering and analyzing the data captured by the DRMS to accurate predictive models