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A recent Wall Street Journal article highlights the electric power infrastructure planning problem and specifically the issue of forecasting future load conditions:
Falling U.S. electricity production in the past two years is frustrating the utility industry and shaking up timetables for some major infrastructure projects.
Electricity output decreased 3.7% last year, the steepest drop since 1938, according to federal statistics, following a nearly 1% decline in 2008.
The recent downward trend is making it trickier for utilities to forecast future power consumption, a critical component of planning investments in new power plants and transmission lines.
The article points out that appropriate capacity expansion decisions depend very much on future load conditions and future conditions can be, and usually are, highly uncertain. If current load is close to existing capacity it is likely that investment will be needed in the near term. The questions are how much investment and how soon. The answers depend on future load growth dynamics.
A particular investment situation might face a very large number of possible future load trajectories. The possible load trajectories might be characterized using load scenarios. To illustrate, the scenarios might include: (1) load growth that is currently low and likely to continue to grow slowly over the longer term (10 to 20 years), (2) low load growth currently but with the potential for periods of rapid growth over the planning horizon, (3) moderately high current growth rates but an uncertainty about the continuation of these rates. The number of possible load trajectories can be very large. This webinar will discuss an approach for characterizing the future load growth dynamics and will demonstrate how application of the approach can provide valuable planning information.
In this webinar we will present a forecasting method that combines the best judgment of your planning engineers with a model of load state dynamics to produce probabilistic characterizations of longer term load conditions. In addition, based on capacity planning research, we will also explain how load dynamics affects the value of alternative infrastructure investment strategies.
Learning Outcomes Participants' in this webinar will identify a new way of approaching infrastructure investment decision making. The new approach explicitly recognizes and accounts for future load trajectory uncertainty and the implications of the uncertainty on the riskiness of their investment choices. The participants will review:
- The interplay between load growth, economies of scale and optimal investment strategy
- The impact of load uncertainty on optimal investment strategy
- A new approach for forecasting future load conditions – this new approach deals directly with a key source of investment risk – load uncertainty
- How to integrate the new forecast information into infrastructure investment decision making
Requirements for Successful Completion of Program Participants must be logged in to the web conference for its entirety to receive continuing education credit. Instructional Methods Web based PowerPoint presentation and on-line interactive question/answer session. Continuing Education Credits: EUCI is authorized by IACET to offer up to 0.2 CEUs for this program.
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