Emergency and Economic Demand Response
CPower has years of experience working with utilities, ISO/RTOs, municipal power companies, and cooperatives throughout North America and designs tailored economic or emergency demand response programs for our clients to meet regulatory requirements, address rising electricity prices or mitigate reliability problems.Emergency Programs
Emergency demand response programs (also known as capacity programs) are used by utilities and ISO/RTOs throughout North America to mitigate and help prevent involuntary load shedding (blackouts) that would otherwise be caused by unexpected conditions on the grid, such as the sudden loss of a generating facility or damage to a transmission or distribution line. In many ISO/RTO programs, demand resources bid alongside generation in annual or monthly auctions to meet the installed capacity requirements. In typical programs, demand resources can sign up for day-ahead or day-of notification of a load reduction event. These events are very uncommon, but the service provided by these pre-programmed load reductions is extremely valuable to the utility. Participating end-users receive an availability payment for each month that they are willing to provide this service. These emergency programs can be short-term (e.g. to meet capacity needs before new generation or transmission lines can be brought on-line) or long-term, to provide a percentage of the system's capacity needs on an ongoing basis. CPower can design a demand response program that provides a reliable resource on schedule and within budget.
Economic Programs
Economic demand response programs (also known as price response programs) are one of the most common types of programs and one of the fastest to implement. Clients enrolled in these programs can curtail load in response to high locational marginal prices (LMP). Typically, CPower and the utility or RTO will agree on a particular price threshold above which it would be valuable to reduce system load. Clients are then allowed to specify their own price threshold. When LMP is projected to exceed the client's price threshold, the client is notified and expected to reduce load within a certain time frame (notification is typically a day-ahead or on the morning of the operating day). The client receives a payment tied to the LMP for each hour that they reduce load. Clients in all sectors - including multi-store retail, commercial, industrial, institutional and large residential -
can participate.
To facilitate a client's participation, CPower conducts a thorough audit of the client's operations and current energy consumption, which is used to develop a customized curtailment plan. The curtailment plan may include a combination of load shifting, distributed generation, automated controls and load shedding. CPower also sets up a real-time monitoring, metering and a communication platform. This platform allows CPower to provide both the client and the grid operator with real-time operations data, rapid response to dispatch instructions and accurate performance reporting for settlement purposes. Many clients enroll in both economic and emergency programs, thereby meeting multiple objectives of the utility or ISO/RTO.
CPower has years of experience in multiple energy markets in all aspects of the client relationship. The company has an experienced engineering team and a sophisticated software platform for metering, monitoring, and controlling energy use, as well as for providing the settlement data that enables demand response clients to collect revenue on their curtailment efforts. Rather than reinventing these platforms internally, it is often faster and far more cost-effective for utilities to partner with CPower. In addition, CPower is willing to guarantee the performance of its resources, thereby reducing the operational and reliability risk of the utility, ISO/RTO, muni or coop. Instead of enrolling dozens of small-to-medium commercial and industrial loads and having to individually monitor each of those clients, the utility can enter into a contract with CPower for a specific amount of megawatts to be provided under pre-contracted conditions and leave all the details (including all the utility's noncore functions) to CPower. As a result, partnering with CPower is often the least expensive way to add new and reliable capacity to an electric grid and can often be delivered in a matter of months, compared to the multiple years of lead time associated with new generation. CPower's emergency and economic demand services are a powerful tool that utilities and ISO/RTOs can use to meet their need for new capacity.
Meeting Immediate Supply Needs
