Dominican Republic Electric Power Sector Strategy

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

The Dominican economy faces very high electricity costs. The challenges are focused on finding ways to reduce supply costs to consumers and to recoup investors’ investments in the country. That approach misses that electricity has two sources of costs for the economy: supply costs and shortage costs.

On the one hand, efforts to reduce supply costs on the part of the authorities and power sector agents have become difficult by the lack of local sources of primary energy at reasonable costs of development, leaving a structure based mainly on petroleum derivatives. These actions to reduce supply costs must continue to be done as part of the country strategy.

On the other hand, customers have individually invested large amounts of money to reduce shortage costs. It has resulted in an emergent policy of everyone for himself. Installed capacity in the industrial sector has surpassed 1,500 MW. From a country point of view, there is an excess of installed electric capacity, and nonetheless, shortage costs are very high because low reliability. While it is very difficult to decrease supply costs, technological progress and consistent market rules bring us an alternative to substantially reduce shortage costs to the country. It is about enabling Demand Response.

Demand Response differs from a process of direct control. The response is voluntary to help keep adequate reserves at every moment. It is performed using protocols where, for example, customers arm their devices to wait for a call to respond to the price signal sent by the operator; when the signal arrives, the equipment or a person responds to change from the system (without synchronizing) to the plant or interconnecting a generator (synchronizing) or shutting down part of the load to consume less at higher prices.

In response to costly general blackouts of large geographic areas in recent years, eleven developed countries are executing the first round of a project to produce the necessary tools for project participants to be able to deploy Demand Response in their electric markets to address local problems. Because of the great interest that has arisen, a second round is being organized to which China, India, South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, and Thailand are interested in joining. The Dominican Republic is also being invited to participate.

As can be seen from the “Country Electricity Risk Management: The Case of the Dominican Republic under a Customer Orientation” brief, the country is well positioned to reap the benefits of that institutional project. Incorporating Demand Response to the electric power sector strategy, results in an efficient integration of the investments of the sector and those in the property of the customers.