Government, utility, and private subsidies for energy efficiency play a prominent role in current efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, yet the effectiveness of this policy approach is in dispute. One opportunity for empirical analysis is provided by the past energy efficiency subsidies, called demand-side management programs, offered by electric utilities in North America over several de...

The domain of multi level forecast combination is a challenging new domain containing a large potential for forecast improvements. This thesis presents a theoretical and experimental analysis of different types of forecast diversification on forecast error covariances and resulting combined forecast quality. Three types of diversification are used: (a) diversification concerning the level of le...

We study a two-stage purchase contract with a demand forecast update. The purchase contract provides the buyer an opportunity to adjust an initial commitment based on an updated demand forecast obtained at a later stage. An adjustment, if any, incurs a fixed as well as a variable cost. Using a dynamic programming formulation, we obtain optimal solutions for a class of demand distributions. We a...

Distributed storage capacity at load centers (e.g., deferrable demand) can lower total system costs by lessening the differences between the peak and the lowest daily demand, thus reducing the conventional generating capacity needed for reliability purposes. These savings have impacts both on the operational and capital expenses of the peaking units used for generating adequacy, and therefore o...

In this paper, we consider the classical multi-fare, single resource (leg) problem in revenue management for the case where demand information is limited. Our approach employs a competitive analysis, which guarantees a certain performance level under all possible demand scenarios. The only information required about the demand for each fare class is lower and upper bounds. We consider both comp...

41 REASONS FOR DEMAND MANAGEMENT IN THE NETHERLANDS Despite the already overcrowded roads, especially in and around the Dutch conurbation, a further growth in the use of cars is expected in the near and farther future. Demographic and economic forces are the main factors for this development. There is widespread consensus, not only in The Netherlands, that building roads is not the right answer...

This project describes the electricity demand and energy consumption management system and its application to Southern Peru smelter. It is composed of an hourly demand-forecasting module and of a simulation component for a plant electrical system. The first module was done using dynamic neural networks with backpropagation training algorithm; it is used to predict the electric power demanded ev...

Managing customer demand can be challenging for a facility that services delay-sensitive customers. Attracting a high level of demand will result in long delays, which discourage customers to request service. However, low demand means little profitability for the service facility. Pricing is a known way to effectively manage demand. We determine the optimal pricing strategy for the service faci...

This paper aims to interpret Demand-Side Management (DSM) activity and to point out its problems, adopting micro economics as an analytical tool. Two major findings follow. First, the cost-benefit analysis currently in use has the following problems: (i) inconsistency in cost comparison between utility costs on the supply-side and utility costs plus customer costs on the demand-side, (ii) incon...