Demand Response
On Australia’s National Electricity Market the wholesale price changes every five minutes, and can swing from negative prices, as low as minus $1,000 per megawatt hour, to the market price cap of $23,200 within a single day. Demand response is the practice of shifting when your business uses electricity to take advantage of that volatility, rather than paying whatever the price happens to be at the time.
Where to start
The site covers the whole topic in detail. Depending on where you are in the journey, one of these three routes is usually the right starting point:
- I want to understand the fundamentals. Start with Demand Response Explained, with The NEM Explained and Electricity Tariffs Explained as background on how the market and your bill actually work.
- I want to know if this applies to my site. See the Questions Water Utilities Ask, and if you operate a wastewater treatment plant, Demand Response Feasibility for Wastewater Treatment Plants.
- I want a quantified answer. Read How I Work to see the process from plant assessment through to implementation and ongoing monitoring, and what the Spot Price Forecasting tool does.
What is on this site
Each page covers one part of the picture:
- Demand Response Explained – what demand response means, why electricity prices move, and what makes a site a good candidate.
- The NEM Explained – how the wholesale market works, five minute settlement, price caps, and regional pricing.
- Electricity Tariffs Explained – how retail tariffs are built and where the incentives to shift load come from.
- Demand Response for Wastewater Treatment Plants – how pumping, blower control, and biogas cogeneration shift load at a treatment plant.
- Spot Price Forecasting – the tool that predicts wholesale prices so a control scheme knows when to shift.
- How I Work – the delivery process, from feasibility study through implementation to ongoing monitoring.
- Questions Water Utilities Ask – answers to the questions that come up before committing to a study or implementation.
Is demand response worth doing for your site?
Sites tend to be good candidates when they have flexible load that can shift in time, existing or planned on site generation or storage, and a large enough electricity spend that a modest percentage saving is material in dollar terms. The physical flexibility is usually not the hard part. What is missing is a quantified answer to what that flexibility is actually worth against real wholesale price volatility, which is what a feasibility study provides.
You can see what one of these simulations looks like, a replay of a full year of a wastewater treatment plant responding to real wholesale prices.
Where to from here
If your question is not answered on the site, the fastest way to get a specific answer is to start with a plant assessment, which is also the first step of the feasibility study itself.