This calculator is made by Shared Electric to explore the power of load shifting.
Load shifting is one of the techniques used in demand-side management. It involves moving the consumption of high wattage loads to different times within an hour or within a day or even within a week. It doesn’t lead to reduction in net quantity of energy consumed in an electricity. It simply involves changing the “when consumed” rather than “how much consumed”.
To understand the reason behind load shifting, one needs to realize that electricity generation is a dynamic process involving several different kinds of generating stations employing different generation technologies. Accordingly, there are different costs associated with electricity generated at any given point of time. This means that there exists savings in net generation costs if it could be moved around in time, even while keeping the net generated energy the same. This is where load shifting comes into play.
This shifting can happen in multiple different ways. For example having variable electricity price and thus encourage consumption in specific hours, remote controlling specific appliances etc. or with flexible energy delivery agreements with industries. This calculator is meant to show how shifting can lower procurement cost. It is also meant to help explain that shifting focused on lowering procurement cost often goes together with lower carbon footprint.
A Load Profile is a list of values indicating the energy use at each specific hour.
Flexibility profile describes the flexibility of the load profile. How much can load shifting influence the load profile at each hour upwards and downwards?
That button allows you to add a new power source to your electricity system. You choose a name and the cost of production per kWh and co2 per kWh. For each hour of the day you indicate minimum and maximum generation capacity.
This allows you to edit the load profile and flexibility profile.
This button moves the load profile to the optimum load profile within the bounds given by the flexibility profile while keeping amount of units the same. That is: How should you modify the load profile to obtain optimum savings?
The calculator shows a specific load profile and the power plants that need to run to fulfill that load profile. You can drag the load profile up and down within each hour and see how the power-that run change. One the right side you see the difference in units generated, running cost and CO2 footprint between the load-profiles before and after dragging.
This calculator is for demonstration purposes only and belongs to Shared Electric GmbH. All rights reserved.