 DSMoreTM
The utility industry has changed significantly over the past 10
years. Wholesale deregulation is now common. RTO’s are emerging
as successful and likely permanent, entities. Direct load control
programs continue to grow as a cost-effective alternative to plant,
or physical generation. Customer siting of micro generation units
and other distributed generation is creeping along at a slow, but
non-zero pace. Environmental compliance, natural gas resource availability
issues, electric wholesale price volatility, and infrastructure
reliability concerns, among others, represent some of the increasing
complexities that today’s utilities face. To respond to these complexities,
today’s utility planners need better, more robust analytical tools
to cope. Today’s planners need to look beyond traditional “system
lambda” production costs (versus forward, openly traded markets)
and consider the impacts of using traditional average costs for
their energy-related decision making
Demand Side Management Option Risk Evaluator (DSMoreTM) is a powerful
financial analysis tool designed to evaluate the costs, benefits,
and risks of demand side management (DSM) programs and services.
The power of DSMore lies in its ability to process millions of calculations
within seconds, resulting in thousands of cost effectiveness results
that vary with weather and/or market prices. By viewing DSM performance
and cost effectiveness over a wide variety of conditions, managers
and regulators are in a better position to measure the risks and
benefits of employing DSM measures versus traditional generation
capacity additions
DSMore provides all of the familiar cost effectiveness test results,
including Utility Cost Test, Total Resource Cost Test, Ratepayer
Impact Measure Test, and Societal Test. Moreover, these test results
are provided for various weather conditions, including weather normal,
and under a number of wholesale market conditions. DSM measures
perform better during higher priced wholesale markets and more extreme
weather. In fact, given that these two environmental forces tend
to occur at the same time, the added boost in value that accrues
to DSM avoided cost has a natural upward skew in value By viewing
numerous test results, the upward skew in DSM cost effectiveness
becomes apparent. This added option value of DSM measures in the
face of high wholesale market price conditions indicates the extent
to which some DSM measures are undervalued by using more traditional
single scenario methods, such as DSManager. Interestingly, a traditional
DSManager analysis is actually one of the several thousand test
analyses that are conducted by DSMore during each program evaluation
Users and analysts interface with the complex programming power
of DSMore through Excel. If you can use Excel, you can use DSMore.
This means that the power of DSMore is available to more than just
technical users, statisticians, economists, or engineers. One worksheet
holds your DSM program inputs and the remaining worksheets provided
all your requested output. Changes are as simple as cell changes
within Excel, and ad hoc additions to your inputs or outputs can
be done within the same Excel file, if
Highlights
- Evaluates thousands of DSM cost effectiveness scenarios over
a range of weather and market price conditions.
- Allows user to change DSM program parameters and reevaluate
in seconds.
- Employs real customer-specific hourly load shapes in calculations.
- Provides equivalent DSManager results for comparison.
- Familiar and easy-to-use Excel interface.
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