Analytic Issues Regarding Gas Cooling Assessment in an Integrated ResourcePlanning Context. Topical Report, October 1993

摘要

Major analytic issues associated with integrated resource planning (IRP)methodologies are identified and interpreted in the report. The analytic techniques for IRP were developed primarily in the context of the regulation of electric utility planning. Gas cooling represents a subset of demand-side management (DSM) options referred to as fuel substitution. In the IRP context fuel substitution means the switch from a device using electricity to a device using natural gas, petroleum products, renewable energy, or other energy sources. A discussion is provided of IRP and trends related to its implementation, the measures applied to IRP proposals, the California Test and other relevant tests, and three important sets of analytic issues that play major roles in the calculations of the costs and benefits of various IRP measures, which are long-run avoided cost (LRAC) issues, fuel cycle (or fuel trajectory) issues, and externalities issues. The study specifically takes a natural gas perspective on these issues, which is conspicuously absent from the rest of current IRP literature.