By aggregating and controlling the energy use of large-scale equipment, load management can offer industry and municipalities a new source of revenue without sacrificing productivity. The idea behind load management is to carefully control the use of flexible loads, loads that are less time sensitive such as water heaters or the heating or cooling systems for buildings, to help balance the grid. Load management is so beneficial, ENBALA, a smart grid start-up from Toronto, can pay companies for their every day electrical usage of these large loads.
Milad Fekri is a PhD student working with Prof. William Dunford. His research area focuses on load management and he has been collaborating with ENBALA.
Milad explains the advantages of load management by using the analogy of a hot water heater in your home. The electricity demand of the hot water heater is flexible in the sense that water can hold heat for a period of time; this makes it possible to use other variables to influence when the water is heated such as, when the electric grid needs to increase load to regulate the overall 60 Hz frequency of the grid. In order to operate the power system reliably and in the most cost effective way, it is important to have an on-going balance between generation and demand. The ability to more precisely manage the demand on the electric grid also helps to integrate renewable resources that are intermittent such as wind and solar power. These intermittent sources have traditionally been difficult to include in the larger grid because they threaten to destabilize the grid. As the control of the grid becomes more refined it becomes easier to incorporate these important energy sources.
Milad and his colleagues at ENBALA are working to find other types of loads with the flexibility to be used in grid balancing. Milad begins by looking for energy consumption that is not crucial in terms of operation time, for example, charging an electrical vehicle is not crucial for the period that you are not using the car; you can postpone the charging time. The ability to delay the power consumption is the first thing to consider in looking for new load sources.
Ron Dizy, CEO of ENBALA, in interview with Katherine Tweed, described the potential savings of grid balancing, “a 3 percent efficiency savings from running a generation resource more efficiently for a utility like BC Hydro could cut costs by $80 million to $100 million per year.” The goal is to manipulate the loads to the maximum efficiency of the hydroelectric turbines. The outcome will be reducing and balancing the drain of our dams and making power available for other uses.
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