State-owned power utility Eskom, which halted its demand-side management (DSM) interventions last year owing to funding uncertainties, reports that some of the programmes will be restarted this year and that a savings target of 975 MW has been set.

Speaking at a Fossil Fuel Foundation conference on Wednesday, senior GM for integrated demand management Andrew Etzinger reported that R1.7-billion had been set aside for the programme.
The money had been secured through the DSM allocation allowed for by the National Energy Regulator of South Africa for the third multiyear price determination – an approval that was well below the R20.4-billion applied for by Eskom for the five years between 2013 and 2018.

The decision to restart the programmes, Etzinger reported, had received the blessing of the electricity war room, set up by Cabinet in December, and would be supplemented by as-yet-unfunded DSM interventions being considered by government. In fact, DSM was the fifth element of Cabinet’s five-point plan for dealing with the country’s current electricity shortfalls.

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Demand Response is any reaction to a stimulus that changes electricity demand in a market. The response to that stimulus seeks to achieve a variety of correlated and beneficial results. Those include bolstering electrical grid reliability, ensuring that demand doesn’t exceed supply, and flattening demand curves by redistributing consumption from peak periods to offpeak times. DR also addresses operational and emergency reserves, capacity, and real-time balancing. 
Any electricity market participant can initiate these DR actions. That includes consumers, retailers, Distribution System Operators (DSOs), Transmission System Operators (TSOs), suppliers, and aggregators. 

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