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

该奖项将支持弗吉尼亚理工学院电气工程系Saifur Rahman教授对日本进行为期10个月的长期访问，与东京电力公司（TEPCO）的研究人员进行合作研究项目。他的共同主持人将是计算机与通信研究中心人工智能技术部的Toshiaki Ohashi先生和研发计划部技术研究组的Akira Maeda先生。该研究将包括评估日本电力公用事业中需求侧管理（DSM）影响的技术研究。他们将处理与需求侧管理活动相关的不确定性建模。这些不确定性源于未知的客户对DSM计划的反应，以及他们是否愿意在不理想的条件下保持对该计划的兴趣。将尝试使用拉赫曼教授在电力工程的其他领域应用的“两两比较”技术来模拟这种不确定性。一旦有了这种不确定性的定量测量，它们将被应用于发电扩展模型，以检查用电需求管理对容量需求的影响。本文将研究一种新的负荷持续时间曲线建模技术，这将有助于表征DSM对峰值负荷、负荷因子和能耗的影响。这将为研究用电需求管理对容量需求的影响提供一种分析方法。在过去，已经采用迭代方法来研究这些影响。分析方法可以更快地得到精度更高的解。该研究具有比较价值，也应该提供一种潜在的方法来评估DSM项目的启动。这项研究还可能产生与目前使用的需求管理评估方法根本不同的有用的分析技术。拉赫曼教授在与电力系统工程有关的广泛主题方面知识渊博。他在电力系统规划领域著述颇丰，熟悉日本电力行业。东京电力公司是日本最大的电力公司，也是世界上最大的私营电力公司。它为2200万客户提供约50,000兆瓦的峰值需求，使其成为进行直接负载控制研究的理想公用事业。该方法的成功开发可用于评估一些新的DSM计划在美国电力公用事业行业的影响。预计即使在正式协议终止后，研究人员之间的合作努力仍将继续。预计该项目还将出版若干出版物。

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.