EAI presents Cleantech Snapshots: a quick summary of some of the most interesting and innovative areas in clean technology that will drive the sustainability movement in future.
This snapshot focuses on Energy Demand Management. Within this page you will find
- An overview of Energy demand management
- It’s objectives
- Concept of Demand management
- Components
- Benefits
Overview
- Energy demand management refers to the manipulation of consumer demand for energy through incentives and awareness
- A key goal of demand management is to encourage consumers to use less energy especially during peak hours, or to move time of energy use to off-peak times
- Peak demand shifting can significantly reduce the need for peak load investments in power plant infrastructure
- Demand-side management involves reducing electricity use through activities or programs that promote electric energy efficiency or conservation, or more efficient management of electric energy loads
Energy Demand Management model(Image source)
Objectives
- Promote high efficiency building practices
- Encourage the transition from incandescent lighting to more efficient compact fluorescent lighting
- Encourage customers to shift non-critical usage of electricity from high-use periods to after 7 p.m. or before 11 a.m
- Encourage programs providing limited utility control of customer equipment such as air conditioners
- Promote energy awareness and education
Our specialty focus areas include 
Concept
- Energy demand management was initially set up for planning, implementing and monitoring a set of programmes and actions carried by electric utilities to influence energy demand. It is mainly driven by economic considerations
- It is a breakthrough that led to a great deal of innovation at business management, technological development and huge environmental benefits
- DSM tools already exist, which is being used widely by many utilities, mainly the tools related to Load Management
Components
- Energy efficiency (EE): It is designed to reduce electricity consumption during all hours of the year, attempting to permanently reduce the demand for energy in intervals ranging from seasons to years and concentrates on end-use energy solutions.
- Demand response (DR): It is designed to change on-site demand for energy in intervals from minutes to hours and associated timing of electric demand/energy use (i.e. lowering during peak periods) by transmitting changes in prices, load control signals or other incentives to end-users to reflect existing production and delivery costs.
- Dynamic Demand(DD): The concept is that by monitoring the power factor of the power grid, as well as their own control parameters, individual, intermittent loads would switch on or off at optimal moments to balance the overall system load with generation, reducing critical power mismatches.
Benefits
- Reduced cost
- Environmental and social improvement
- Reliability
- Improved markets
- Reductions in customer energy bills
- Stimulation of economic development
- Creation of long-term jobs due to new innovations and technologies
- Increases in the competitiveness of local enterprises
- Reduction in air pollution
- Reduced dependency on foreign energy sources
- Reductions in peak power prices for electricity
See also: an interesting emerging cleantech segment – Building Energy Analytics
