KPPC - Demand Management Webinar

Hello, this is Richard Meisenhelder. Welcome to KPPC's Demand Management webinar. We do
apologize for the audio difficulties that we've been having. I believe we've got that
stopped and we're going to start over here. We haven't lost too much time, so I think
we'll be okay. This Demand Management webinar is one of our continuing environmental sustainability
training series. I am Program Manager for Environmental Sustainability here at KPPC.
With me today and helping deliver today's webinar is Bob Miles, Senior Engineer with
us here at KPPC. On behalf of Bob and myself, and the rest of us, we do hope you find this
webinar helpful. It is specifically designed to assist large commercial and industrial
facilities with better understanding electric demand, how it is measured and tracked, how
it is billed, and general opportunities that you may be able to find related to demand.
We'll have about 45 minutes worth of slides, we'll have time for some Q & A after that.
If you could please submit any questions you may have as you already have been through
the Chat box in the lower right panel. We will address these at the end of the presentation.
Alright, we're going to get started over again here and we should have audio this time.
I'm going to send it over to Bob. Bob, go ahead and get us started.
Thanks, Richard. Probably one of the greatest reasons why people are interested in Demand
Management I'm sure accounts for most of our audience here today is it's a cost, actually
a charge on your electric bill. It's one of the sizable charges there - demand charge,
as well as energy charge. Those are probably the 2 biggest components. I think it would
be worthwhile to talk about that just briefly before we start getting into a little more
detail about this. Demand Charge basically is the greatest amount of power required during
the billing month. That's how it will be recorded on your bill ñ it will be that greatest
value that's established during the billing period. That value can actually vary up and
down sporadically through the course of the days /weeks of the billing period for customers.
Really what this demand charge is doing is accounting for the cost for the utility's
infrastructure. They have to maintain a capacity for their service area and make sure they
have that available to that area at all times. Demand is metered two different ways mainly:
on a peak basis or on an interval basis. That's typically at 15 or 30 minute intervals. Either
way it ultimately is going to be billed on the highest peak power requirement for a month.
That may be metered in terms of true power or apparent power. True power is measured
in terms of kW and apparent power is measured in terms of kVA. We don't have time to go
into the differences between kVA and kW, but a basic understanding is knowing that if you
see kVA or kW on your bill that is basically the demand charge component of it. Now on
an interval basis, this gives an example of how that calculation is done to determine
that demand for each interval. The example here is for a half hour: 1,000 kWh was measured
for a half hour. So what happened is that 1,000 kWh value would be divided by 0.50 hours
and that would be essentially 2,000 kW of demand. That number is actually an average.
It's not instantaneous, it is an average demand. All those values will be monitored
across the course of a billing period to determine the maximum value which will determine your
demand charge. Just some background to make sure everyone has this awareness ñ one kilowatt
(kW) does equal 1,000 watts (W), so when we talk about kilowatts we will know that this
represents a thousand watts. The other major component of your electric
bill is Energy Charge. This is based upon the actual amount of energy used during the
billing month. It accounts for the cost of producing electricity. So where demand talked
about the infrastructure, this is a cost for producing it. It's typically measured in
kilowatt hours. For mathematical terms, a kilowatt hour is basically a thousand watts
of power used for one hour. Now that we know that there are two main components
on your electric bill, there are numerous analogies out there to try and understand
the concept of the demand which is power and consumption which is energy. Demand can really
be related to your speedometer. Most of us all travel day in day out in our automobiles
and we'll see a speedometer. What that is giving us as feedback is the rate of travel.
It's more of an instantaneous type reading. That's analogous to how demand is. It's
the rate of your energy use and it's more of an instantaneous type value that is being
monitored by the utility. Whereas your odometer is tallying-up the total miles that were traveled
in your automobile. That's pretty much how consumption is metered. It's actually looking
at the cumulative amount of energy that was used during that billing period.
Now that we have those two basic components reviewed there, we'll go into a little bit
more about electric metering ñ how it's metered and also how the different types of
demand charges are offered through the utilities. There are basically two types of meters. The
first is the mechanical meter which has been out for quite a long time. As a child I used
to go behind the house and look at our electric meter. I would see that disc turning and understand
that the faster that disc was turning, something got turned on - usually a dryer or something
big. The slower it went meant there was not a lot going on - having an understanding that
it was basically tracking the electric usage there or the energy. There are mechanical
meters that also track peak demand. Again, that's sort of an instantaneous type value.
So there will be a gauge there that will read demand. Once a large quantity of power has
been sensed by that, the needle will move up to that value. Unless there's a large
amount of power that's required by that meter it will stay there until it happens. Ultimately
at the end of a long period, those values are read for usage and demand that's being
charged to the client. So that is a manual type of operation. Luckily nowadays, things
are getting smarter, these meters are becoming more electronic and they are based on computers.
That usage state is now being recorded and sent back to the utilities various ways. It
can happen though hardwire, radio frequency, a LAN or internet. That also pertains to demand.
Now you start seeing how interval data ties into this. Actually it's monitoring the usage
over interval periods and actually grabbing that through the calculations and backing
into the demand value. So all that information is being quantified there.
There are some specific advantages to smart metering and that's obviously one of the
major points of this webinar. Probably one of the beat things is that it allows customers
to do some analysis. It gives some feedback to the customer to see what is going on in
the facility, what the demand profile looks like and then be able to take a little closer
look to see what opportunities make exist. In some cases, depending on the utility there
may be a charge involved, you will be able to take that signal that's being sent back
from their meter to the utility, tap into it and actually record it on your own computer
systems. That would actually be a real-time type situation where you can manage things
and look at things on a real-time basis. Either way, being able to look at this data does
offer the potential to look for load shifting and load shedding opportunities, which we
will be talking more about in a couple of slides down the road here with Richard's
presentation. For everyone's awareness, smart metering
is advancing through the state of Kentucky. We won't go through all the specifics, but
know that LG & E and KU, Duke Energy, Inter-County Energy, South Kentucky Rural Electric Cooperative
and Jackson Energy Cooperative, all these are advancing with the smart metering technology.
I'm sure that more of it is coming about. So having that background and understanding,
there are things happening throughout the state of Kentucky. One thing that's become
more and more popular is the emphasis on the smart grid. I would say a smart-er grid. We
don't have a dumb grid by any means. It's pretty dynamic in what it does; but, to communicate
better is what is being emphasized now. This is obviously one of those components. President
Obama has issued a new emphasis on making sure that that initiative doesn't die ñ
to look at smart grid technologies. So now that we know a little bit about metering
and the ins and outs of that, it's worth while getting down to one of the major reasons
we're concerned about demand: because of costs. That really goes on both sides, whether
it is the utility or the customer. There are different ways that demand can be charged,
the first of which is what is known as the flat demand rate. This can be at a single
level, a straight dollar per kW charge that's assessed to the peak demand that's established
during that billing period. Or it can be tiered. Really what that is, is above a fixed level,
for example 500 kW there will be a different charge than the first 500. Typically what
will happen is that for the first 500 will be a set fee, then after that 500 it will
be a lesser fee. Typically they go down as you go up in demand. That's really because
of the economy of scale there. So there are single levels and tier levels involved in
the flat rate structure. Here's an illustration of flat rate, how
that works for demand charges. Really what we'll focus in on is right here in the electric
charge section. When we blow that up, we see that there is quite a bit of information here
but we'll get to the main things. There's rate type here, power service rate. Then we
go down and there's a customer charge; this is typically a flat fee. Then we go on to
what we were just talking about ñ the energy charge component. Quickly, what grabs a lot
of people there is the cost. If you look at the major components of the electric bill,
how can you reduce that? What you see here is actually for this particular client on
this utility the energy charge was quite substantial. Actually it turns out to be around 56% of
the total electric charge. Really what that is the total kilowatt hours that are used
during that billing month times the set dollar per kW. Likewise for flat rate example, what
happened was the client required 2577 kW during the billing period ñ that was the peak. The
flat rate was $9.03 for kW, resulting in a $23,000 charge, which is about 30%. So obviously
demand is important from a financial standpoint and if we can find ways to reduce that, obviously
there is financial incentive to do so. Another rate class is Contract Demand. The
first and foremost is understanding that if you have a contract with the utility be sure
to review it and understand if it specifies that you have to set a contract demand. Basically
a contract demand is a type of tiered rate where the facility gets to set the demand
level at which the demand charges changes. It basically allows the customer to determine
where the dollar per kW rate will change. If the client has not done so already, what
we typically suggest is when establishing that contract demand is to assess their historical
billed demand data. One thing we always encourage is to contact the utility and the corresponding
account rep to make sure that data is reviewed. Likewise, it's always important to look toward
the future and determine if the operational plans are going to change. Hopefully, down
the road if it's adding on production maybe we need to assess should our contract demand
be a little higher just because we anticipate it happening sooner. So obviously looking
into the future is another component for that. When you're doing a contract demand there
is an optimum when you're selecting it. Basically this is our real example that we've worked
with a client. What we see here is actually the demand charge cost based upon that contract
demand. This is the contract demand value. This is actually a sensitivity analysis to
see the optimal contract demand for that client based upon historical data. What we see on
the left side here in this blur circle is actually where the contract demand, if it
were set at these values, it would be too low. They would be paying excess demand penalty.
They would be going over that contract demand fairly routinely. On the flip side, on the
purple over here, that would be where the contract demand was set too high; therefore,
you're never really reaching that contract demand value and you're having to pay extra
because it's never been realized. So there is somewhere in the middle there for this
particular client ñ it's about 155 kW ñ that's really where the optimum is. That's
where you want to try to hone in on and look at future operations to see if in fact that
makes sense for your facility. Now we're going to talk about Demand Ratchet.
This is interesting and we see it quite often in rate structures. This is all based upon
the utility because they're trying to ensure that they have enough to cover for the cost
of infrastructure. The clients just need to be aware of this billing mechanism. What it
does is select the highest demand from the current billing period or from previous billing
periods. Sometimes it can be expressed as a percentage of the highest demand recorded
in the previous period of time typically it would be 11 months. We'll give an example
here and this is actually another client we've worked with. They had this experience and
we were able to give this information to them so they had that awareness. What we see here
is demand on the vertical axis again and the months here that we're examining for the
time period. In September, for this customer, a high demand was established, about 450 kW.
The utility said your current billed demand is going to be based on the higher of two
things. It's either going to be your current billing period demand that was reached or
85% of the highest demand achieved during the preceding 11 months. So essentially that's
what happened here. After September, the client's demand never reached 450 ñ it actually trailed
down and that's what is represented in the purple bars. As you see, because of that Ratchet
Clause, starting in November all the way through July the plant started incurring what's called
Additional Billed Demand charge because of the 85% Ratchet Clause. There are clauses
like that out there; we just want to bring that to everyone's awareness. Obviously demand
management comes much more important because it not only affects your current billing period
but could actually influence future billing demand periods.
The next classification that we want to talk about is Time-of-Day. This is really one of
the main things that we see nowadays where interval data becomes integral into our analysis.
Basically what time-of-day does is establish periods for demand pricing. Typically, there
are at least two periods, but there can be up to three, the first of which is your lowest
cost period which is known as off-peak. That's typically your nights and weekends or periods
of lowest use for the utilities. Then what's called On Peak, or you highest cost periods,
are like what we are experiencing now in the summer, typically in the middle of the day
and on weekdays that will occur. Some utilities actually have what's in between that known
as a mid-range cost period which is known as intermediate or Shoulder. So depending
on your utility you may have all three. One thing to note is this is typically done for
demand pricing; but what can also happen in the future is Time-of-Use pricing, where your
dollar per kWh, kilowatt hour, can change based upon the time of day that the energy
usage occurs. Here's a graphical representation of the
simpler of the two types of Time-of-Day rates that we've seen. What we see is Demand on
the vertical axis over here and this bar the course of a day. The Off Peak period is early
morning to mid morning, then it goes into the On Peak period. This is when the demand
starts to increase as indicated by this blue line. In the course of the day as we start
getting into the dusk and night, we go back to the Off Peak period. This is giving a financial
incentive to the utility's customers to try to minimize their demand during On Peak periods,
because their infrastructure is being taxed the most during those times. So, if it's
possible to shift your operations over to Off Peak, there will be a financial incentive
because the On Peak demand price is typically higher than Off Peak.
We have sort of a matrix here that shows the second type of Time of Day rates available
out there. We don't really provide this for a direct comparison among utilities, but just
to give some illustration of how those utilities sort of design their time of day rate basically.
What we see here is the first column ñ Peak Cost, Peak Hours. What we see is the Peak
Hours are fairly consistent across the board. I think Duke and AEP have a little broader
type of area there that they're covering in their Peak period. One thing of note is
that LG&E and KU actually offer what we call Shoulder periods, which occurs from 10 to
10 actually - 10:00 am till 10:00 pm. That's not typical of many other utilities right
now, but they do the Shoulder periods. The base periods are Off Peak periods; all of
these utilities offer that. One thing to note here though is that the Off Peak period or
Base period as LG&E and KU refer to it, this period covers all 24 hours of the day; whereas
Duke and AEP is pretty much the time period that's not considered Peak, it's considered
Off Peak. So there's a little difference there. These are for the summer period, but
likewise there's another set of parameters for the winter period and they might just
differ slightly with the hours that these periods occur.
One of the last things we'll talk about as far as clauses and charges here is Interruptible
Power. This rate ties into a utilities need to manage their power capacity during the
course of the day. There are certain scenarios where the utility may be taxed to the point
where they will have to make a decision. What they've done is design a system in which
customers can voluntarily sign up and say they will sign up for some incentive. The
utility says if you sign up for this there's going to be a requirement tied to that. What
it is typically called is Interruptible Power or Curtailment. It works two different ways:
Interruptible Power can be set to where you reduce to a certain amount, also known as
firm demand load or it can reduce by a certain amount. The customer will typically be given
a credit for each billing period for being involved in this process, for being on this
program whether they are asked to interrupt or not. However, one thing that definitely
clients should be aware of is that if you are not able to meet the requirements to satisfy
the utility which are fairly strict and not much leeway there, there is a sizable penalty
there. So there is risk involved, financially, with this. If you are not able to meet those
requirements, certain utilities will kick you off that and you will not be able to join
again. There are obviously some repercussions there.
This is likewise a matrix that is explaining the different ways of doing Interruptible
or Curtailed riders there offered by different utilities. One thing to notice is the minimum
notice ñ what will happen is likely the utility will call the client and ask for them to curtail
within certain notice. What we have seen in the actual tariffs is within ten minutes.
So obviously the client is going to have to understand whether that is do-able and also
have standard operating procedures in order to get down because in the contract it says
ten minutes. If you by chance have to go over ten minutes there will be penalty charged
there. So that's something to be noted, as well. Another thing is some utilities that
are in the state of Kentucky have negotiable terms. So they are maybe not locked down like
some other ones. You have to negotiate those terms when you understand what your capabilities
are. Okay, that pretty much wraps up that information
there as far as how things are charged and metered and the basic components. What I'll
be doing now is turning it over to Richard. He will be discussing load factor, load shifting
opportunities, and then real life examples that we've experienced and talk about the
demand interval data analysis of that. Thanks, Bob. As Bob said we're going to go
through one more topic here, Load Factor, and then get to some graphs and start to look
for some opportunities and see what we may find there.
Load Factor, let's talk a little bit briefly about that, what it is. Load Factor is essentially
an indicator of how steady the electrical load is over a period of time. That really
means it is a ratio of how much energy you actually use against how much energy you could
have potentially used. Your actual usage is your kilowatt hours (kWh) that you're going
to be billed for. Your potential usage is going to be what your Peak Demand was for
that month, multiplied by the number of hours in that month. We'll show that graphic here
in just a minute; I think it will make that a little more clear for you.
Load Factor is one of the indicators, usually a fairly good indicator, of the opportunities
that may be present in a particular facility for demand reduction. What we will normally
see as this table indicates is that a single shift operation, an eight hour shift, single
shift per day operation may see in the neighborhood of 35% load factor. If you have two shifts,
you're probably around 60%. If you have three shifts, that's around 80%. That would be
considered a typically good load factor for that type of operation. You have to worry
about it because it's a fairly good indicator that you may have some potential savings,
if it's low for your type of operation. You have to start asking yourself some questions
then, such as Do you start all your equipment at the same time? ; Can you move that around?;
Can some major energy-using processes be run during what are for you and the utility Off
Peak time? A lot of times that can result in some significant savings.
This is a generic Load Factor graph. This is an interval data graph in the black like
Bob had talked about before. This is 15 minute intervals for this company for an entire month
- in this case, the month of February. The load factor for this facility is about 62%.
That is the ratio of the black area that you see over the entire area of the yellow rectangle.
The yellow rectangle you can see from the very top edge is where the demand interval
peak is right here. If you would have used that much energy over the entire month, that's
the block of energy you use ñ about a 62% ratio. We will look at a few of these in more
detail as we go down here. We're going to mention both of these: Load
Shifting and Load Shedding are often talked about together. They are a little bit different.
If you combine what you do in an energy audit with interval data graph and the operational
information that you get from talking to people on-site, that's what is going to get you
opportunities both for Load Shifting and Load Shedding. Load Shedding, just eliminating
demand totally, is going to be combined usually with eliminating usage also and that's going
to be energy efficiency opportunities that you might identify on an energy audit, say
replacing this electric oven with a lower power oven that will still do the same process.
That's a topic for another day. We're going to talk more about Load Shifting today ñ
how you can reduce your demand bill through moving your individual process loads around.
Load Shifting is going to be essentially taking part of what you do, part of the stuff that
you are operating with electricity, when you're operating the most of all your stuff and moving
that to periods of time when you are not operating most of your electrical stuff. We'll take
a look at that graphic later and I think that will be a little bit more apparent for you.
You do have to realize, though, that will not reduce your overall usage. You're still
going to use the same amount of kilowatt hours, same amount of usage of electricity. You're
just going to control when you use that and reduce your overall instantaneous demand at
any one time. Some of the types of Load Shifting. Again
essentially you're looking to move operational hours for select processes to non-peak times.
That could involve some exotic stuff like thermal energy storage systems. It could involve
some fairly simple stuff like trash compactors, clothes dryers ñ any type of equipment like
that that could be run at night as opposed to during the day. For a manufacturer, they
might be moving your operational hours more to nights or weekends. Might be a little bit
more involved like demand controls, to give you some immediate response during peak demand
windows. Then we'll look at just a real quick simple
generic case of load shifting here. In this particular case you've got a baseload here
of about a thousand kilowatts that this facility has and they've got two processes here - both
of them running on dayshift. That's giving you an overall peak demand of about 2000 kW.
That's what you will be billed for, if this is the way you are running your operation.
Alternatively, if you were to take those two processes and mover them around so they are
not operating concurrently, you could reduce your overall demand down to about 1500 kW
ñ that's a 500 kW saving, assuming you got about $8 per kW, that's about $4000 a month,
pushing $50,000 a year. You've got some good potential with load shifting.
This is a quick graph of a facility that did some of that and had a grand total savings
of almost $11,000 by moving a few of their processes around. It looks like, as you can
see, each month they had just a bit of savings. As Bob mentioned before, you will get and
you can get demand interval data from your utility. Usually that's going to be a 15
or 30 minute intervals. It's going to look pretty ugly when you get it. This is a sample
that we just kind of threw it here of what you might get ñ this is the first few months'
data. Usually there would be some kind of identification signally what your client number
is, some kind of date stamp on here, this is the fifth of December of 2010, the hour
stamp 8:15 a.m. and what the kilowatts are at that particular time. So what can you do
with all that data? You can get really fancy with it if you want to. Excel has the capabilities
to do 3-D graphs, like this one here. For detailed demand management analysis these
can be pretty helpful. You can manipulate these 3-D graphs, you can turn them up-side-down,
inside-out, right-side-up all kinds of ways. But 2 dimensional graphs often tell you a
lot of what you need to know and that's what I'd recommend for anybody to start, if they're
just starting to look at demand interval data. This is a 2-D graph, a sample company. Company
A in this case is a metal fabrication plant. It operates a couple of shifts for a few days
a week, a couple of ten hour shifts for a few days a week and a couple of twelve hour
shifts for the rest of the week. Essentially they are running most of the week minus about
eight hours short of being a 24/7 operation. If you take the peak for this month, that
looks like it's about here on the eighteenth and you draw the straight line across like
we did on the yellow rectangle graph before. You do a little bit of a visual, run the numbers,
you get about 62% on this load factor here. That's not real good for this type of operation
with the amount of hours they're operating. They probably ought to be a little bit higher
into at least the 70s, 70%, maybe 75% or so. You can clearly see that the week's worth
of operations here, you can see the weekends, they've got a little bit going, they're
shutting down in-between weekends and the nightshifts. Essentially with load shifting
what you're looking to do is take some of this usage that's here and dump it down into
these valleys here, so that you get more even consistent usage. If there is one thing that
utilities love it's clients that use the same amount of energy at the same time every
day in the same way. They like consistent usage. As Bob alluded to in some of his references
to rates that are offered, they will give you an economic discount for doing so if you
can make yourself a little smoother. What I like to do is take the same information
that we had before ñ that's this graph here again and take that same information and rearrange
those data points for that entire month in 15 minute interval data from low to high.
It gives you another perspective on what you are looking at with this. You can see in this
case you've got a baseload of about a little over 200 kW all month long. Again you kind
of saw that up here in the graph you can see that 200 is pretty much used all the time.
You can see a little bit of a step up right here with one of the major processes kicking
in and you got a little bit of a spike going on up here. I'll show you a few more slides
in a minute that will indicate this is not really that high of a spike, probably not
a lot of opportunity for demand management right there. But I at least wanted to show
that to you for now. This is a week ñ one week in the life of
this company. This is fairly interesting. This is seven days, demand interval data and
you can see that we kind of start out on Thursday and Friday down here at flat line at about
175 kW. This is their baseload, they are not operating any of their processes during this
time or at least nothing that's operated on an intermittent basis. You come back in
on Saturday, this process kicks in, runs for this long of time ñ that's about 6:00 a.m.,
comes back down about 7:00 p.m., they shut part of it down but not all of it, come back
in on the next day, Sunday, part of that process back up again, keep part of it up, come back
in on Monday, fire all the process back up it looks like and they continue to run that
for about three days for the rest of the balance of this period. It's just interesting that
you can look at this and kind of see what's going on in the facility. If you combine this
type of picture with operational data that you know is happening at the facility by talking
with people on site, you can get a pretty good idea of what's going on ñ what operation
is responsible for that much load, which one is being shut down, what's responsible for
that, and a lot of other good info. Just to kind of give you the ways that you can slice-and-dice
this information. This is another company. This one happens
to be a large commercial office facility. In this case, we have also plotted degree
days. Degree days can be used to indicate how much energy needs to be added to help
keep or cool a facility in the summer and winter. This happens to be a shoulder month
ñ this is April ñ it may not be too hot, it may not be too cold, so you don't see
a real strong correlation between the demand level and the degree dates. But somewhere
along the line ñ it may be July ñ you got a big AC load, especially for an office building
like this, you're likely to see a small correlation. Then you can pick out which part of your demand
load is correlating with that AC and which part isn't. So maybe you get an idea that
way of what the AC load is and what the non-AC load or the process load is. This particular
facility has got about a 50% load factor, operates 10 hours a day Monday through Friday.
That's probably a fairly good load factor for this type of facility.
This is the same information just sliced a little bit differently. We smoothed out that
degree data curve and put in daily peaks for the demand level. It gives you a little bit
of an indication that there's still not really that big of a correlation going on. Sometimes,
actually not seeing a correlation can be as helpful as actually seeing a correlation.
It gives you more information about what's going on and what's not going on.
This is another company. This one is a commercial entertainment facility. In this case, we've
plotted daily demand against attendance level. This particular facility, you can think of
it as like a concert type venue, so you don't have a whole lot of people on site and then
boom! You get a spike of several hundred people, over a thousand people going into this facility.
This is July, so that tells me it's a commercial-type facility and it's going to have a large AC
load, so probably a lot of this daily spike right here is related to just the AC load
kicking on. You do get a little bit of demand over and above kind of that average, and that
seems to be related to the spike in attendance. Again that gives you an idea of what your
baseload is, if you're curious how much energy your AC system is using that will give you
one visual indicator, and indicate what else is going on demand-wise in the facility.
This facility is also pretty interesting. This one is a manufacturer ñ it's a forging
operation. You can clearly see the Monday through Friday operational schedule. This
one is a couple of ten hour shifts Monday through Friday and then they set a little
bit of Saturday. You can clearly see the weekends here, you can see a long weekend here ñ Monday
the seventh of September would have been a holiday. Couple of things stick out to me
when I look at this one. One is this big spike right here that's sticking out all by its
lonesome. It's significantly higher than any other spike that month to the tune of
about probably 1500 kW. This one over here also sticks out. This facility, I'm wondering,
are they firing up a couple of different processes during the day on dayshift and then shutting
it off at night, firing up a couple of processes again, and firing down? In this particular
case here, did they fire up maybe just one part of that one process and not shut it down
at night, keep it running through the course of a couple of days? To me that could indicate
an opportunity ñ is that a new operating procedure that needs to be in place, because
it looks like they cut about 1500 kW off the demand level. At about $8 per kW, that's
going to be some significant savings again for this facility, for a year in excess of
$100,000. So let's look at that information in a couple
of different forms. This is that information again in 3-D ñ just to show you that spike
right there, it's the only thing above 10,000 for the entire month. It shows a clear spike
for the second of September. Looking at it in the low to high format, again there's
that spike right there a real skinny spike ñ you should not see that if you're plotting
a month's worth of interval data. That's indicative of demand opportunity, something
happened right there. We need to find out what that abnormality was, what happened on
the second of September. We need to talk to the people in the facility, find out what
odd occurrence happened, what mishap happened, or maybe testing of different operations or
processes that you don't normally do, what happened that day. That could eliminate about
1500 kW worth of demand. You see this process kicking in right here, a little bit about
this process kicking in here and about probably 1500 kW or so of baseload demand. This gives
you a good visual on what's happening with the facility.
I'm going to take you back now about three slides. This week right here that had the
spike in it, we're going to take a little closer look at that particular week. This
is that week blown up. You see the holiday kick in right here, the three-day weekend,
you see that spike. That particular spike was about 11,500 kW. The next highest spike
that month was a little bit over 10,000. If they can get again the process in control
to where that little 15 minute issue wouldn't have happened, you're talking in excess of
$100,000 in opportunity, probably in excess of $140,000. That's significant, that's
worth checking out. One other one real quick ñ this one happens
to be a distillery operating 24 hours a day Monday through Friday. You wouldn't really
know that by looking at this demand data graph so much. The Monday through Friday operation
is not quite as evident. You do notice there's a kind of gradual ramp up every day on the
left side of each day ñ that jives with the distillery. It's going to have a slow heat
up for their process, maybe have a little quicker shutdown. We did have a spike on 5/1
that you notice right here, the first of the month. That looks like it's a little higher
sticking up by its lonesome. So we might want to take a little closer look at that. Load
factor for this facility, if you draw the lines right across there, is about 47%. That's
probably fairly good for a 24 hour day Monday through Friday. I take that back 47% is probably
not as good ñ this one should probably be closer to at least 60%.
This is another view of the same data. Again you can see that vivid spike right there.
I would say they ought to be able to cut off at least 75 or maybe 100 kW for this facility,
if that's consistently happening across the year. At $8 per kW, that's about $9600 a
year in savings. That may not be a lot for some facilities, maybe very significant for
some ñ it depends on your operations. One of the things I did want to stress is
that we're typically looking at one month's worth of data here in these examples. When
you look at your facility or we look at a facility, you will want to look at several
months to see what happens, because things could change with spring, summer, fall, and
winter come. So do a crosscheck of several months and verify that it's consistent.
One last facility here, this one is a ten months look at a facility. Each one of these
large spikes is actually condensed into an entire week. It's pretty evident that you've
got one operation at this level taking a look at about 2500 kW that's going on some weeks.
Some weeks you've got another operation and it's taking it up around 5000 kW level. You've
got probably about 600 or 700 kW worth of baseload going on down here. This facility
operates 24 hours a day Monday through Friday, with a couple of weeks a year shutdown. Load
factor is about 30%, that is very low for a 24/5 operation - they should be at least
in the 60s, if not in the 70s for this operation. That would indicate that you maybe have some
opportunities. Looking at that data and again the low to high format, that first operations
is not really evident; it's getting blended in with a lot of stuff. But that second operation
is really when it kicks in. If you take the ratio of this distance over the whole distance
across here, I would say that's about 10% of the time that this process is running.
A little bit of a spike right here might be indicative that they could maybe cut maybe
500 kW or so off of that if they look closely and started talking to each other, which would
be a fairly significant savings again, if that holds up over several other months.
Look at one week in the life of this facility. This one is really interesting and this is
our last graphical slide, because again you can follow this process through. Starting
out Saturday, Sunday down here, flatline not really doing anything. On Monday they start
kicking in a little bit. Tuesday they start picking up a little bit more and more at that
second level that we've seen before. By Wednesday, they're kicking in the second operation to
get up here a little closer to the above 4000 kW territory. This to me is a good possibility
for maybe Interruptible. Bob had mentioned that before. I can look at this graph and
I can tell that this operation right here took about 30 minutes to get fired up. It
took about the same amount of time to get down. So if my utility offers an Interruptible
rate and they have a window of 30 or 60 minutes to interrupt load, I should be good to go
ñ especially if it's 60 minutes. I'm good to go as is, because it looks like most days
it's only taking me 30 minutes to get there. I've got about 2000 kW of load right here
that I could potentially interrupt. At $5 a kW, that's about $10,000 a month that we
could potentially be looking at, that's some pretty good savings.
If you only have a ten minute window for your Interruptible, you might still be okay. What
you need to do is to figure out what it's taking to shut this process down. If you have
ìJohnî that shuts this process down and he pulls this switch here and he has to walk
to the other end of the plant to throw another valve, and then come back to this end of the
plant to throw another switch to get that process shut down and all that takes 30 minutes.
If you station 3 people at those posts and you had a coordinated system of walkie-talkies
or something that might cost a few hundred dollars to get in place, could you get your
system shut down in ten minutes? At over $100,000 a year opportunity, that might be worth investigating.
You could run that test one day, see if you think you got it shut down in ten minutes,
then let your utility know that you're trying that test, that you're trying to offer them
a couple thousand kW in Interruptible load. Call them the day afterwards and say can you
send me the Interruptible data for yesterday, I think I ran a successful test and I'd like
to see the interval data and see if it looked like we're going to be able to work with
you. Usually the utility will work with you to let you see how you did.
Just a couple other things we'll mention before we conclude. We do have a couple of
upcoming events. We have an ITP Steam Systems Assessment Training coming up on the 27th
of July. That's a good one-day course if you'd like to check that out on our calendar
of events. We also have a Kentucky Energy Alliance Facility Tour and Roundtable coming
up at U.S. Playing Card Company in Erlanger on the 3rd of August. They are going to take
us on a tour of their facility, they have a really neat facility and we'll have several
companies talking about what they are doing with energy management.
So that's going to conclude our slides today. We hope that was helpful for you guys and
we'll ask to see if we got any questions. If anybody would like to login, we will answer
any at this time and if we don't get any here in a little bit we're going to wrap
up. I'm told that we have no questions now. Hopefully, you have found this helpful and
we will leave our closing slide up here. It does have email information and we'd be happy
to answer any questions if you'd like to email us. If you'd like to go to our website
and take a look at some of the services we offer. We do thank you for your participation.
We apologize one more time for the audio issues we had in getting this started, but do hope
that you found it helpful. I would ask if you could close out today by going to the
file tab in the upper right-hand corner of your panel. There is an ìexit leave webinarî
button and that will enable you to get our follow-up survey that we're going to do.
We appreciate you filling out that survey to give us information. Is there anything
else that any of our group would like to add here today before we close?
Yes, I think we had a question regarding if our slides would be available for viewing.
We are going to be able to make those available on our website. We will also have the recording
of this webinar available as well. So we'll get that up as soon as we can.
Okay. Good deal. There's also a question about thermal storage,
as far as that being an opportunity to reduce your demand. Probably the best way to get
that information to you, if you don't mind contacting us, with that specific interest
and we will be able to work with you to find some information for you on thermal storage.
I believe there are just a few thermal storage operations in place in Kentucky. That works
really well in places where they have a lot of daily AC load. Like in Florida and places
like that. I think there are a few in Kentucky, but we would be happy to research that and
give you more about that. I think that's going to conclude the questions
we have and conclude our webinar today. On behalf of me and Bob and the rest of KPPC
we appreciate your participation and thank you. Hopefully, you can check our website
out again and be sure and exit with the ìexit leave webinarî button so we can get the survey.