Interruptible Electric Rates: Where We Are Today

Abstract

Interruptible electric rates are as far from being a widespread method of load management today as they were almost nine years ago at the height of the Arab Oil Embargo. Utilities and industrial consumers have been 'cooperating' to reduce overall cost since the early sixties and even earlier in Europe.

Now is the time to reevaluate where we are in our effort to find the optimum utility industry cooperative arrangement involving interruptible power rates and then promote it as a method of energy management. Within the past few years, time-of-use rates, for both industrial and residential users, have been touted as the answer to shaving peaks and filling valleys in a utility's load curve. Their effectiveness in doing so, however, is still open to question. By contrast, load management - where for economic reasons a customer permits the utility to control the power switch - is guaranteed to accomplish this.