Country Electricity Risk Management: The Case of the Dominican Republic under a Customer Orientation

© José Antonio Vanderhorst-Silverio, PhD
Interdependent Consultant on Electricity
April 17, 2005

The Dominican Republic is one of the countries best positioned to reap and recoup the benefits of Demand Response Resources (DRR) investments. For reasons that follow, we should accept the invitation to participate in a second round of the International Energy Agency, Demand Side Management, DRR project. Said project produces the necessary tools for the project participants to rapidly deploy Demand Response into their electricity markets to address local issues. The first round is ongoing with 11 developed countries, including the US, Japan and Italy. China, India, South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, and Thailand are interested in joining a second round, which is being structured to begin in the last half of 2005.

The large profit potential expected from tools deployment should interest multilateral financial institutions, as effectively deployed DRRs will sharply raise the probability of timely loan repayment. These tools help implement a decentralized least cost approach on the cost of electricity to customers, leading to maximum public welfare, that also finances capital investments with higher efficiency and lower environmental impact, in addition to addressing local theft and subsidies issues.

With a total country load estimated today at 2,400 MW, during more than 20 years, electricity customers in the Dominican Republic have systemically invested in individual risk management solutions, exceeding now 1,500 MW in the industrial sector alone, to reduce high interruption costs arising from low reliability electric power service. Even residential customer investment in back-up generation and storage (battery inverters) has been exceedingly large. Such investments show that for most customers, shortage cost is much higher than supply cost. Electricity shortage cost has been and still is one of the highest country risks, reducing local and foreign direct investment and thus country development. A successful deployment of DRRs to break such barriers, become both country marketing and risk management tools.

Demand Response is a unique risk management innovation based on advanced metering, computers, telecommunications and control, to efficiently ration electricity when required on a voluntary basis. Risk management under a customer orientation suggests: a) in the long-run, constantly meeting agreed system reliability target is the most economical way to dispatch generation and DRRs, and b) Demand Response is performed to keep the system in the Normal Operating State economic deadband . With DRRs, system reliability can be kept sufficiently high at all levels of the value chain, while customers can choose to differentiate and segment themselves by their perceived reliability needs into suppliers and purchasers of coordinated DRR services, with a business model mechanism to re-coup the profits. DRR elements, property of customers, and a vibrant telecommunications industry, are strategic advantages of the country. The approach is systemic since the vicious cycle of increasing individual solutions, is reversed as DRR increases, which in turn increases system reliability, leading to a virtuous cycle.

DRR has important technical, economic and financial stability benefits. DRR helps the system operator dispatch within safety margins dictated by risk management. Attenuations in short run spot price volatility, and long run boom-bust behavior, are best served with such approach. Avoiding operating close to capacity mitigates widespread blackouts and shortages, while better signaling the need for efficient allocation of investments and infrastructure resources.

DRR has important efficiency benefits. Besides economically integrating, without necessarily synchronizing, the large asset based resources invested by customers, DRRs can be placed at the right system locations to cost effectively reduce system demand and maintain an economic level of reserves; operating distribution circuits with high reliability eliminates the local inefficient costumer practice to invest in transmission substations just to reduce interruption costs; integration of new customers and loads of customers that are operated isolated from the grid increases system economy of scale and reduces country fuel consumption; capacity factors of facilities will increase as well; involuntary high interruption costs will greatly diminish. Such increases in value added and decreases in value destruction by the new DRR profit business model will help direct the industry to financial sustainability. In addition, DRR is also a transition tool to integrate unconventional distributed energy sources to the system when required for environmental sustainability.

DRR can provide benefits to poor customers. With expected theft losses of 30% by the end of 2005, eventual fine-tuning of loss administration can be greatly aided by DRR technology. By requiring Demand Response capability as a condition of service, free riding reliability and theft risks will be properly mitigated. Being developing countries, the second round project participants should add a task to develop low cost devices (just like cell phones are for the telecommunication industry), with metering and Demand Response capability, to create a mass market de facto standard. With such standard and their rights respected with a value of service that balances electricity costs, poor customers can choose to become active, legalized, and thus profitable customers. Hence, the poor can offer and benefit from Demand Response services and thus lower their rates without subsidies in the long run. Financing energy efficient appliances to the poor legalized customers leads to social sustainability. The new version of the Program to Reduce Blackouts (PRA in Spanish) can benefit from DRR deployment, to improve the targeting and efficiency of the subsidy.

Finally, with the multilateral banking community support, the Dominican Republic can also be positioned as a model test ground for DRR research, development and demonstration projects. The country can be available to IEA DSM DRR project participants by developing stable and self-consistent market rules, under an orientation, which differentiates customer service reliability to give wholesale and retail customers’ affordable choices.