Japan Long-Term Research Visit: Techniques for Evaluating the Impact of Demand Side Management in the Japanese Electric Utility Industry

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This award will support a ten month long-term visit by Professor Saifur Rahman, Department of Electrical Engineering, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, to Japan for a cooperative research project with researchers at the Tokyo Electric Power Company, (TEPCO). His co-hosts will be Mr. Toshiaki Ohashi, AI Technology Department, Computer and Communication Research Center and Mr. Akira Maeda, Technology Research Group, Research and Development Planning Department. The research will include a study of the techniques for evaluating the impact of demand side management (DSM) in the Japanese Electric Utility Industry. They will be dealing with the modeling of uncertainty related to demand side management activities. These uncertainties originate from the unknown customer response to the DSM programs, and their willingness or unwillingness to maintain interest in the program under less than ideal conditions. An attempt will be made to model such uncertainty using the "pairwise comparison" technique that Professor Rahman has applied in other fields of electric power engineering. Once such quantitative measures of uncertainty are available, they will be applied to a generation expansion model to examine the impacts of DSM on capacity needs. A new technique to model the load duration curve will be investigated which will facilitate the representation of DSM impacts on peak load, load factor and energy consumption. This will provide an analytical method to study the impact of DSM on capacity requirements. In the past, iterative methods have been applied to study these impacts. An analytical method would result in faster solutions with higher accuracy. The research has a comparative value and should also provide a potential methodology with which to evaluate DSM programs prior to their initiation. The research may also result in useful analytical techniques that are fundamentally different from presently used demand management evaluation methods. Professor Rahman is knowledgeable in a wide- range of topics related to power systems engineering. He is well-published in the area of power systems planning and is familiar with the power industry in Japan. TEPCO is the largest electric utility in Japan, and it is the largest privately owned power company in the world. It serves 22 million customers with a peak demand of approximately 50,000 MW making it an ideal utility in which to carry out direct load control studies. A successful development of the proposed methodology could be used to evaluate the impact of some new DSM programs in the U.S. electric utility industry. It is expected that this collaborative effort between the researchers will continue even after the formal agreement has terminated. It is also expected that a number of publications will result from the project.