The Effect of Load Management upon Transmission and Distribution Costs: A Case Study

A new era may be emerging for the strategists and decision makers who are responsible for reliably and economically supplying electricity to America's homes and businesses. In the last decade, fuel shortages, price hikes, record-high interest rates, and a new environmentalist awareness have led the nation's utility planners to use conservation and load management strategies in order to curtail their customers' demands for energy and plant capacity. Undertaken primarily to reduce requirements for future generation capacity, load management strategies generally succeeded in reducing system peak load. However, utility planners often implemented these strategies with little regard to the effects upon their company's transmission and distribution (T&D) capacity requirements.