Consolidated Edison (NYSE:ED) on Thursday reported its demand response programs increased only slightly in megawatt value last year but dramatically in enrollment, which climbed by approximately 250% compared to that of 2020 (Case No. 14-E-0423).

The company and five other investor-owned utilities in New York filed individual dynamic load management (DLM) performance reports for the state’s Public Service Commission to consider at a hearing Thursday.

Con Ed’s DR programs include its commercial system relief program (CSRP); distribution load relief program (DLRP); auto DLM; term DLM; and the residential Bring Your Own Thermostat (BYOT) program.

Under the DLRP, customers receive notification two hours before a DR event, which is called to address an isolated need. In contrast, the utility’s customers receive notification at least 21 hours before a CSRP event, which is called in response to systemwide peak demand.

Con Ed reported a slight decrease in enrollment in the CSRP and DLRP during 2021, which was the first year of the term and auto DLM programs. The term program is a day-ahead peak-shaving program that incentivizes customers to provide load relief with 21 hours of notice or more, while auto program participants agree to provide load relief on not less than 10 minutes advance notice.

The term and auto DLM programs offer fixed pricing for contract lengths of three to five years and longer-term price certainty compared to tariff-based programs, which can change pricing annually.

The PSC in September 2020 modified DLM implementation plans for the six utilities, all related to storage, saying the initial plans “resulted in a bias towards short-term, low-capital-investment solutions” because of their yearly performance structure (18-E-0130). (See “DLM Incentives Extension,” NYPSC Accepts CLCPA Environmental Review.)

Hearing facilitator Robert Cully, utility engineering specialist at the New York Department of State, asked whether the increase in term and auto DLM enrollments was related to the decrease in CSRP and DLRP enrollments, and whether there was a downward trend in overall enrollments.

A shift in program participation has definitely driven some of the decreases, said Marlon Argueta, energy efficiency program manager at Con Ed, “but when you look at the overall number of available megawatts for DR, it has definitely increased as a whole, and we expect to see that continue over the next few years.”

Aggregators drove the growth in participation by leveraging widespread deployment of advanced metering infrastructure to enroll residential and small business customers in their programs, which make up the majority of new customer enrollments, but each contributes much smaller megawatt reductions.

Shifting Load

David Ahrens, managing director at Energy Spectrum, asked why peaks were different within the four different call windows that Con Ed has in its CSRP program than in previous years.

In general the peaks are shifting more toward the day than the night, Argueta said.

“We are seeing a large movement in terms of how these call windows are aligned … and we have a sense that this is all being driven by some of the things that are happening right now in in the service territory, so COVID-19 brings a lot of folks into working from home and has driven a lot of the load towards residential areas,” Argueta said.

This shift is happening across the system, and of the more than 80 networks in the Con Ed system, the company’s analysis this year determined that 33 had shifted their peaks, meaning they changed call windows repeatedly, he said.

“This is not arbitrary; really the purpose of this program is to reduce network peaks, and we try to closely align those four hours the best we can to maximize the benefits that these programs bring to our system, and it seems that only one network now is peaking from 7 to 11 p.m., so that’s a significant change,” Argueta said.

Peter Dotson-Westphalen from CPower, an energy management company that manages some DLM programs for Con Ed and National Grid, asked for clarification on whether events called that may extend past midnight are still considered to be mandatory.

Under tariff revisions pending before FERC, participation will be mandatory before midnight, just as currently anything beyond midnight will only receive performance payments, Argueta said.

Ultimately, the DR programs are about allowing Con Ed to defer the need to build infrastructure, knowing that it has these resources to rely on, said Griffin Reilly, the company’s section manager of targeted demand management.

“We have some of these networks peaking for longer than eight hours in the day, and to really be able to defer infrastructure builds, we’re going to need resources that can respond for that long,” Reilly said. “How we do that is going to be a big part of the discussions we have this coming summer leading into potential changes that we’ll make for the program next year.”