What is Direct Load Control

Growing demands are causing increased pressure on the electrical infrastructure and perpetually escalated energy prices. Utilities around the world have been considering demand-side management in their strategic planning. The costs of constructing and operating a new capacity generation unit are increasing every day as well as transmission, distribution, and land issues for new generation plants, which force the utilities to search for other alternatives. Here, demand-side management has been implemented as it is less expensive to intelligently influence a load than to build a new power plant or install electrical based storage device. In this chapter, the author has discussed energy efficiency and demand response fulfilling the criteria of energy management which usually tries to take influence onto the energy consumption of a number of energy consumers. The explained demand-side management technical objectives are peak clipping, valley filling, load shifting, load building, energy conservation, and flexible load shape.