Application of Demand Response Programs to Heavy Industries: a Case Study on a Regional Electric Company

In recent years, incremental rate of electrical demands made many challenges for policy makers of power systems. Besides, due to economic crisis and environmental concerns about the air pollution, the new investments in thermal power generation units have experienced a noticeable reduction. For this reason, the power system operators should propose novel approaches to make a balance between incremental rate of electrical demand and decreased rate of generation expansion planning. In this paper, in order to hedge against the aforementioned problem, Demand Response Programs (DRPs) are proposed to control the electrical demands of heavy industries which consume a considerable part of electrical demands in peak durations. In this regard, two types of incentive-based demand response programs, including spinning reserve and curtailable load program, are addressed to decrease the need of new investments in power generation during peak hours. In order to show applicability and proficiency of the proposed approach, a case study containing 23 numbers of heavy industries of Khorasan Regional Electric Company (KREC) is addressed to participate in the proposed demand response programs in summer 2016.