Load Management: Balancing supply and demand
New strategies benefit the cooperative membership
As you likely know, Dairyland Power Cooperative is Dunn Energy Cooperative’s wholesale power supplier, providing our cooperative with the energy required to meet the needs of your homes and businesses. Dairyland and Dunn Energy Cooperative also collaborate on strategies to best increase efficiencies and decrease costs for the benefit of our members and the environment.
Traditionally, Dairyland’s Load Management Program functioned primarily to reduce energy consumption during periods of peak demand, mainly as a way to reliably meet member energy needs while curbing costs. In essence, that original goal still stands: Load Management remains a tool used to balance the demand for electricity with the ability to generate or economically purchase electricity. Dairyland and its member cooperatives save money by deferring the need to construct additional power plants or purchase expensive power during periods of high demand.
Controlling for capacity and economics
The difference today is that Dairyland relies on load management resources for more than peak load reduction since joining the Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator (MISO) as a transmission-owning member in June 2010. Load Management is now also used as an economic tool to reduce wholesale energy costs, to the benefit of cooperative members.
Prior to joining MISO, Dairyland produced power from its own generating facilities or purchased energy directly from a neighboring utility to provide the needed electricity for its member cooperative, such as Dunn Energy Cooperative. By joining MISO, Dairyland’s generation resources are now offered into the wholesale energy market and are therefore affected by the energy used and produced across the region. All generation is dispatched into the MISO market for regional requirements, and sold to MISO based on market prices. Similarly, all of Dairyland’s load requirements are purchased from MISO at market prices.
Dairyland now needs to plan differently and make changes in both operating its power plants and marketing the energy. Simply put, Dairyland cannot just dispatch power from, for example, its facility in Genoa, Wis., anymore to fulfill direct needs.
Therefore, if the current or projected day-ahead market price to purchase energy is too high, Dairyland may now implement load control as a way to mitigate the need to buy high-priced power. A price threshold, on which to base the decision to implement load management or buy power in an inhospitable market, is set to ensure a reasonable number of control events each season.
Full Load Control Times
Economic Control Times
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