download Skype
|
What is peak demand crises?
What is peak demand?
Peak demand is the highest demand of energy consumption during a time cycle. The time cycles are several, depending on the consumption type and external conditions. The worst case is when one or more of the peak demands are added to each other. Examples of peak demands in lighting is when the sun goes down and all the lights in offices, homes and streets are switched on, or when everybody comes to the office a cloudy winter day and all lights, heating and equipment are turned on.
Why is peak demands creating crises?
Well, it is depending on production resources and energy efficiency. The crises is effecting central production facilities like electricity or central providers of heating. (It can also be on individual level, if the equipment installed is badly dimensioned, badly operated, badly maintained or the fuel is exhausted.)
Crises in central production resources is the most serious and most difficult to handle. Normally this is a question of production of electricity. Since a central production facility is dimensioned to produce an amount of defined energy. It must often operate on a 24 hour schedule with defined possible minimum and maximum loads. It will face serious problems if these limits are not kept and the consumption is too small or too large. This is especially important and difficult, with use of nuclear reactors.
If it is a too big difference between the minimum and maximum demand, in a network, it creates very large difficulties. Because it creates the necessity of stopping and starting production facilities on a daily basis. The consequences of this is large economical and environmental difficulties. During a start, the pollution limits are mostly impossible to maintain which is recognized and allowed. A start of a production facility is a high cost procedure. To run a facility for only peak demands multiply the production cost for produced energy with several times of the normal cost. The solution is maybe to create an artificial consumption to keep the facilities running at the minimum consumption, it might be better for economical and environmental reasons.
In a free economy, it becomes nearly impossible to run a production facility for only peak demands, if it is not paid for by the tax payers or consumers. It is therefore very difficult to politically manage a combination of price regulation, high peak demands, low pollution demands, high energy prices, commercial efficiency, etc. If you have a peak demand crises, it is very serious and damaging for the total economy of the area.
What creates a peak demand crises?
The creation of the scenario for peak demand crises, is a combination of several factors. We are listing some of them as follows,
- Periods of extreme cold or warm weather, will often be the triggering factor for a peak demand crises. This because the larger demand on heating or cooling. For technical reasons, cooling is more common.
- Fixed habits like working hours, time zones etc..
- Special events and situations.
- Industry processes and demand for products from high consuming industries.
- Building constructions that react in a predictable way and will need energy to maintain predetermined levels of environmental factors.
- Comfort definitions with only a narrow interval between air temperatures.
- Over-dimensioned equipment for maintaining bad comfort definitions.
- Operating policies which do not include natural balancing factors, like building mass.
- Energy saving measures, that have the major effects only in low consumption periods.
- Price structures.
- Type and volume of energy production facilities.
What can we do to avoid peak demand crises?
The goal is very simple, even out the peak energy consumption over 24 hours. The solutions are on the other hand a little bit more complicated. Let us see what we can do,
- The best thing would be if we could even out the weather and temperatures. In this case we do not have to bother about energy interests or the engineering practices. Correct dimensioning would be easier and suit the engineering community better and pricing/production policies would be more transparent. A steady state weather is necessary for use of steady state engineering principles. This solution seams to be impossible and we are instead left to the alternative to avoid making it worse by pollution.
- With the globalization and the improvements in communication, we could increase the flexible working times and increase the options of working from home. We could also go back to more narrow time zones and increase the trading of energy over several time zones. [shifting demands]
- We have to adapt special events to energy consumption considerations. [shifting demands]
- We could evaluate energy consumption for certain industry processes and lower demands for energy demanding materials and products. We could also consider moving one/two shift industrial processes to off peak hours, by offering special incentives to do so. (or in worst case force it) [shifting demands]
- We could start to use the building mass in a more intelligent way, to even out the demands. This is already practiced in countries like Sweden. [shifting demands and a lot of energy saving]
- We could start to accumulate heat or cold at off peak hours, to be used at peak hours. This is a technic that seams to get a lot of attention today and would be expensive. [shifting demands]
- We could start to use comfort definitions that considers a combination of air temperature and radiation exchange. By this we would get more flexible design rules and a more comfortable environment. [shifting demands and a lot of energy saving]
- We could stop practising the worst cases of over-dimensioning and start applying more exact dimensioning. [shifting demands and a lot of energy saving]
- We could implement standard 24 hour operation policies that includes reducing of over-dimensioning and adoptions to a more relevant comfort criteria. [shifting demands and a lot of energy saving]
- We could be more aggressive in energy saving suggestions that impacts peak hours. [shifting demands and a lot of energy saving]
- We could introduce a multi-tier pricing policy with at least three levels. Peak hour penalty, normal hour price and low hour discount. This might need more sophisticated measurement equipment as a requisite to charge the penalty. [shifting demands and a lot of energy saving]
Conclusion.
The problem is that the energy interests, the product producers and the engineering community, very much like [shifting demands], but seams to resist [shifting demands and a lot of energy saving]. The research community is prepared and understands [shifting demands and a lot of energy saving], but does not seam to get anywhere. One wonder why?
Maybe it is because, as the leading democracy in the world, with all its benefits, the US is also the most skilled in creating political roadblocks and protecting financially strong "special interests". It is a complicated world and as simple engineers, specialized on easy things like energy conservation, it is difficult to understand. The political/commercial turns in this dance are far more complicated than the scientific.
© Copyright energysavingnow.com 2000.
© Copyrights to Software @ this site
|
|
BIOFUELS ASIA
conference
2008 - 27th-28th March 2008,
Thailand
Energy Savings in
UK
Energy Savings in
USA
"Disturbed children"
and
"Grumpy old men".
|
