Direct Load Control: Relationships Between Electric Utility Experiences/Assessments and System Characteristics

In the past decade the electric utility industry, motivated by the need to control spiralling production costs, has expended considerable effort on the assessment and analysis of Load Management (LM) - Direct Load Control (DLC), Time-Of-Day (TOD) pricing, Electric Thermal Storage (ETS), etc. The impact of DLC on a utility's operations depends on the strategies used and system characteristics. However, the growing body of published literature on utility experiences and assessments of DLC indicates that relationships are emerging between system characteristics and the impacts of an DLC strategy.