My iPod is on the Demand Side Part 2

Reference: My iPod is on the Demand Side

After I wrote the comment yesterday an insight came to mind. I had already developed the argument: Demand Response is the best candidate iPod of the utility industry, located at the customer interface of the monopoly transportation system with a real and true potential free market. In that regard, please take another look at "An Alternative Business Case for Demand Response," to understand why it is already the iPod to be developed:

"Contrary to the belief expressed on the November 2004 Issue of the IEEE Spectrum, under the theme of “Right and Wrong,” the late Professor Fred C. Schweppe, of MIT, brilliantly predicted a mayor tech breakthrough in electric power, when he said that "There is a good chance that by the year 2000 the term blackout (societal definition) will be considered to be a term out of the Dark Ages." The chance has been there all along, except that a powerful lobby has delayed it, by keeping the natural monopoly of distribution related or integrated with non monopoly retail marketing. It took the august 2003 blackout and several others in developed countries to initiate a Demand Response Resources project at the International Energy Agency, which I strongly believe will be useful and functional, only if the distribution monopoly is kept totally independent of commercial retail."

Professor Schweppe "envisioned a world of customer-based electrical generation and storage," which has been happening in the Dominican Republic, for quite some time, missing only the Demand Response System and a truly competitive retail deregulation to fulfilled the dream of a country without blackouts. There is an example of the airline industry that will help explain the importance of DR. The DC-10 initiated commercial air travel at the time of the Great Depression, it happened when all required technologies became available, and were tightly
integrated."

"In that same sense, electric power systems will also “fly” reliably (a very low frequency and duration of crashes) and experience commercial quality electricity under complete deregulation, when Demand Response gets tightly integrated with AMI and other existing technologies under a proper market design. DR will enable the system to operate within the Normal Operating State, returning back as soon as possible from the Alert and Emergency States with Demand Response actions. This is poised to be the End-State of the electricity industry for the long run."

I agree with Bart Theilbar that integrating the resources is the key. That is integration of the demand side - a lot of data at the source - with the updated resources of the supply side - referred in the article - is the key to reliable flying. Professor Fred C. Schweppe was right in 1978. It will "happened when all required technologies became [and they are here] available, and [are] tightly integrated." Lets integrate them in my country!!!

The Dominican Republic can be the best place to be if our government understood that we are undergoing the Great Electrical Depression. We need another Roosevelt. It is interesting to learn that since the 90s, when the system crashes - like Schweepe envisioned, but innefficiently because of lack of integration - the economy keeps going like Johnny Walker. What we need is to do is to restructure the market as explained to turnaround the electric power industry here and later everywhere.