Carpentry factory and municipal electricity loads

Load management of electricity loads has received more interest in recent years. At least in Sweden, this is natural because of a rather cheap energy price, while at the same time, the demand charge is high. If a company could save the precise kWh that build the peak demand, then these would have a value of more than 200 times the off-peak kWh. This paper deals with monitored electricity data for two carpentry industries and one municipality, both situated in the south of Sweden. The ideal situation would be if the industry could reduce their peak demand and, at the same time, reduce the peak for the utility. Both participants would, in that case, save money, and the payback time for load management equipment would decrease substantially. If, however, a load management system at the carpentry transfers kWh to peak hours for the utility, the industry will save money, while the utility gets higher costs. The result of the study is that the Swedish electricity rates in use today are a very poor means of encouraging worthwhile load management, and often, they even aggravate the situation. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.