Real time prising (RTP) is an electricity rate based on the actual time-varying costs of providing electric service. It changes with time as the costs of generation, transmission, and distribution change in time. RTP rate can contain both the short-term and long-term costs of electricity supply and revenue recovery requirements. As a complete demand-side management (DSM) option, RTP provides a market force mechanism for DSM programs where customers decide on their options based on rational economic self interest. An experiment on the automatic control of electric thermal storage (ETS) systems under RTP rates shows that the benefits of ETS systems to utilities can be increased by close to 50% under RTP rates compared to the time of use (TOU) based control. Under RTP and ETS charging occurs at times of lowest costs to the utility. These times of lowest costs may or may not coincide with the off-peak periods rigidly defined in TOU rates. Compared to the present utility incentives in USA for load shifting and ETS installations under TOU rates, the additional costs of RTP-based control retrofitting can be easily justified.
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