Cost of Demand Response from Customers' Perspective Including loss of comfort, loss of value added and possible other costs

The electricity price is defined as the average of all the generation costs during a certain time instant. The electricity usage pattern varies widely, depending on weather conditions, certain hours of a day or due to special event in the town etc. Inexpensive power generation plants are usually operation all the time and deliver a base load, whereas, during a certain hour the demand may rise and the generated power is insufficient to meet the demand. In order to tackle with this problem, demand side management and demand response programs are proposed and widely discussed in the energy research nowadays. Under these programs some of the non-critical loads are shifted to other times of a day when the overall demand of electricity in a certain area or town is relatively low. This idea is attractive for all the stake holders including utility companies, distribution system operators and end users. However, the customer comfort levels are compromised during its implementation. The major objective of this work is to study the demand response costs and quantify them in correlation with customer comfort levels and the lost of leisure time. In power business and academic studies the mostly used methods to evaluate costs are Indirect analytical methods, customer surveys and case studies. In this thesis, the customer survey based methodology is adopted to evaluate DR costs for various reasons described in the thesis. The main purpose is to develop a proper mathematical model to estimate the demand response costs from residential customers’ perspective and to provide the utilities and power consumers an idea about these costs