Investigating the role of demand resources in regional transmission planning has provided mixed results. On one hand there are only a few projects where demand response has been used as an explicit alternative to transmission enhancement. On the other hand there is a fair amount of demand response in the form of energy efficiency, peak reduction, emergency load shedding, and (recently) demand providing ancillary (reliability) services. All of this demand response reduces the need for transmission enhancements. Demand response capability is typically (but not always) factored into transmission planning as a reduction in the load that must be served. Much more demand response is used (involuntarily) as load shedding under extreme conditions to prevent cascading blackouts. The amount of additional transmission and generation that would be required to provide the current level of reliability if load shedding were not available is difficult to imagine and would be impractical to build. In that sense demand response is utilized as an alternative to transmission expansion and is included in regional transmission expansion planning and reliable operations.
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