About This Episode
Craig Kleinhenz, AMP Assistant Vice President of Power Supply Planning, discusses the resources AMP makes available to Members to assist in their peak shaving efforts.
Transcription
The Public Power Line Minute – E3
Peak Shaving
Zachary Hoffman: Welcome to The Public Power Line Minute, quick conversations on timely topics that are important to AMP Members. I’m Zachary Hoffman, Manager of Communications and Publications with American Municipal Power, and in five minutes or less, I will help you to stay up to date on the latest issues of importance. Today, we are joined by Craig Kleinhenz, AMP’s Assistant Vice President of Power Supply Planning. Craig, thanks so much for joining us.
Craig Kleinhenz: Absolutely. A pleasure to be here.
Zachary Hoffman: For anyone who might be unfamiliar with the term, could you give us a short explanation of what peak shaving is?
Craig Kleinhenz: Peak shaving is lowering your load at times of high usage. This has been important because both our capacity and transmission costs are set during those peak timeframes.
Zachary Hoffman: Could you explain what those are and how those are determined?
Craig Kleinhenz: Yeah, so transmission is the cost to build and maintain the big high- voltage power lines that you see running throughout the area. So, when that transmission company has its highest load hour for the year, whatever our municipalities’ loads are during that peak is how much transmission costs that they are responsible for an entire year. Capacity is a charge to make sure there are enough power plants out there at the time of the peak. This is charged in a similar way as transmission, but slightly different.
So instead of just your local transmission company, it is the entire region. But also, it is not just that highest hour, it is actually the five highest hours. So, we are trying to lower our load during the entire regional grid’s five highest hours.
Zachary Hoffman: So, is there generally a specific time of the day that those occur and when are the peaks most likely to be set?
Craig Kleinhenz: Capacity peaks are typically in the summertime and a lot of our transmission companies peak in the summertime as well. That is a lot of times in that late afternoon, early evening timeframe. Transmission companies can also peak in the wintertime and that is usually either early in the morning or late in the evening when it’s really cold outside.
Zachary Hoffman: And what kind of savings have Members seen from peak shaving efforts?
Craig Kleinhenz: So, our Members have seen a lot of peak shaving success here recently. Last year we received over $140 million worth of savings by lowering our load during those capacity and transmission peak hours.
Zachary Hoffman: What are some of the best ways that Members can go about peak shaving?
Craig Kleinhenz: There are two ways to go about reducing your load during those peak hours. The first is with behind-the-meter generation. So, this is generation or power plants that are located within your Member community. The other side is what can we do with our loads themselves? So maybe you have a foundry in town or a large customer that is able to shift their usage a little bit.
And then when you get into commercial and residential, that is things like looking at trying to shift lighting usage and getting customers to change their thermostats in order to save costs for an entire year.
Zachary Hoffman: And then how can AMP assist Members in their peak shaving efforts beyond that?
Craig Kleinhenz: So, we do not exactly know for sure when these peak hours are going to occur. And AMP has a forecast and alert program where we monitor things. We send out weekly updates on when we think these peak events might occur. So, Members can sign up for that. And that helps to let them know when they need to be running their behind-the-meter generation or communicating to their customers on when to reduce usage.
Zachary Hoffman: Just to close it out — what would you say to any Members out there interested in participating or learning more about peak shaving?
Craig Kleinhenz: Yeah. So, there are several resources available. We do have a webinar that we just conducted that goes into a deeper dive on the AMP Peak Shaving Program. You can reach out to us and get your name added to the AMP Peak Alert email list where we would tell you that you can start getting those notifications. But the biggest thing is just reaching out to AMP in general. And we can get you pointed to the resources that you would need in order to get more active in peak shaving.
Zachary Hoffman: Perfect. All right. Well, it sounds like a worthwhile program. Craig, thank you so much for joining us.
Craig Kleinhenz: Absolutely. Thank you.
Zachary Hoffman: I am Zachary Hoffman, your host for The Public Power Line Minute, brought to you by American Municipal Power. Thank you for joining us. If you found this episode helpful, be sure to share it and subscribe so you don’t miss future conversations on the issues most important to AMP Members. You can find The Public Power Line and The Public Power Line Minute wherever you get your podcasts.