Demand Side Curtailment Resources

When Demand-Side Curtailment resources are dispatched, they represent the inability to provide energy to satisfy load by local area resources or by imports while maintaining operating reserves, hence a loss of load or curtailment of demand.

Real-world cost of demand curtailment is a very ‘soft’ number, meaning that it depends upon how the curtailment is valued (i.e., point-of-view).

From the utility point of view, it might be a reduction in revenue and/or increased cost to react to the curtailment.
From the customer load point of view, it could be the loss of revenue for commercial/industrial businesses or the recovery cost of process-failure caused by the curtailment (e.g., glass container processing or aluminum refining).
From a political/regulatory point-of-view, the ultimate cost to respond to a loss of load situation is perceptively higher because electricity is considered a basic fundamental service. This is primarily why NERC is now the ERO (to enforce reliability criteria).

Curtailment vs. DSM

In Aurora, the word “demand” anywhere in a resource name indicates that the resource is a Demand Side Curtailment unit not a supply side resource, and its operation represents load that could not be served. (Note the difference of resources defined by Fuel Type as DSM or Conservation resources.) Demand side resources will generally not be dispatched until the model runs out of other physical resources to serve load (even if they are specified as being cheaper than other units), and they will not be included in the reserve requirement. The "demand" resources are not included in the ORM calculation.

Reporting

Curtailment resource output are reported in the Demand_Side_Output, Demand_Side_Output_Hours, and Demand_Side_Output_Total columns. Note that these columns also include any demand relaxation that occurs due to problem infeasibility.

Default Values

In default databases, the values for the cost of the various Demand Side Curtailment units were chosen to meet several criteria including:

Cost for curtailment units should be sufficiently high to promote New Resource options to be selected in long-term capacity expansion runs (which produce a resulting Resource Modifier table).
In Resource Stack, the merit order of curtailment units should be above the highest cost dispatchable resource (but below the dispatch-penalty of unit-commitment units).
Cost for curtailment units should be sufficiently high not to require re-adjustment of the resource stack with typical fuel price increases over time.

Each Area in the Energy Exemplar-delivered US_Canada database has two Demand Curtailment resources, a First Block and Second Block, that represent a supply shortfall (i.e. an inability to meet demand during a simulation).

The First Block represents a mild or moderate loss of load event, has a capacity equal to about 5% of the Area’s peak demand, and is priced around $550 in 2012 dollars.
The Second Block represents either a very severe loss of load event, or an issue with the project setup or input data which prevents Aurora from meeting the specified demand with the provided resources. This block has 10,000 MW of capacity and is priced around $6,000 in 2012 dollars.

This Curtailment structure is typically sufficient to promote adequate capacity expansion in energy-only simulations, and provides useful price signals for troubleshooting input data issues.

Knowledge Base

Demand Side Curtailment Resources