Remember when I talked about how Electricity is a struggle even in developed countries?

Here's a thread about the Industrial Curtailment Initiative (ICI), a technique used to solve this problem in Ontario, Canada.

In Ontario, Electricity costing is variable rather than fixed.

That's because generation has to match usage, which is variable for reasons like:

- People are more active at certain times
- Weather can mean more people use appliances like Heaters and Air-conditioners

Because usage is variable, all generating plants cannot be on all the time, else electricity and the money it costs to keep them on will be wasted.

So the IESO (their PHCN) uses prediction models to know when to connect their reserve plants to the grid if usage is expected to

Remember these generators cost money to run, so as Usage goes up, the customers get charged more to use electricity.

Keep that in mind, cos it's going to be important in the following:

Now sometimes, the Usage dangerously nears the capacity of all the IESO's generating plants, so the Ministry of Energy introduced the ICI as a way to reduce the usage when this happens.

They do this by providing incentives for the customers to do this themselves.

What kind of incentives? The very best ... Money!

As Usage goes up, the costs get dangerously high, so as a customer, if you can switch off (curtail) at really high points (peaks), you can save a bunch of money on energy bills.

But how does a customer know Usage is high?

The IESO provides forecasts that a Customer can check to know if Usage will peak for today or not.

E.g. Here's a graph showing the forecast for Usage (Demand) today.

http://www.ieso.ca/en/Sector-Participants/Settlements/Peak-Tracker

The yellow bar shows the range of Megawatts Usage/Demand that the Top 10 past peaks have occurred in.

This means that today, the Usage might just become one of those Top 10.

ICI savings are calculated every year, and customers who curtail during the top 5 peaks become beneficiaries.

Now, here's the kicker.

If the IESO says today will have peak Usage, everyone tries to curtail, yea?

And then it ends up not being a peak, because everyone curtailed.

So, what chance does the average Customer stand to correctly predict days?

Some companies have gotten really good at using systems designed for these kind of problems.

And this is why I go to work everyday.