Kerala is notorious for its positives and negatives. Let's dwell on a particular negative. Load Shedding is/(was) a popular concept in Kerala. Load sheeding is the mechanism designed to deal with the perennial shortage of electricity in the state. Each energy consuming unit in the state is deprived of the utility for a fixed period of time. The timing varied across the state. But the proportion of electricity rationed for each consumer was equal across the state.
Think of an alternate mechanism. Suppose there existed a market for trading electricity rights. Here we make the implicit assumption that power is more valuable for certain people at a given point in time as compared to others. Hence the marginal benefit of power could be different among different consumers. To crystallize the idea, let us look at a hypothetical example.
Consider the following situation: The uniform power cut across the state is for 1:00 hr. It is 10:00 Am in the morning and at point A a doctor is in surgery working on a patient. At point B a clerk has just locked his home and is leaving for work. Both point A and point B are in the same locality, where load shedding begins at 10:30 AM and ends at 11:30 AM.
The marginal benefit of power for the doctor is far greater than that of the clerk (assume his wife works too and kids go to school or that he is single). Hence, there can be a trading mechanism where in return for no power outage in the hospital, the clerk bears a 2 hour outage from 10:30 to 12:30. In return, the hospital pays the clerk a monetary compensation. The government stays unaffected as its optimal load shed does not change. Effectively, the government, doctor and the clerk is better off.
In this situation clearly the consumer with highest priority and the consumer with the lowest priority are better off with this arrangement. What about consumers in the middle? It is not always the case that we can find consumers at two extremes. Can they be made better off too with trading rights?
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Load Shedding
Posted by Mad Max at 8:51 AM
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3 comments:
Power outages not only consider no. of hours. But also a potential decrease in usage of power during that time.
Easier solution is to have a multi-level users. i.e. with guartneed power service for higher cost. It is simpler model since it is controlled by one unit instead of distributed model. And government benefits instead of individual users.
But both of these assumes a infrastructure which can switch on/off at per user level. (which we don't have)
Again all this will work for transparent departments. Since in corrupted governments this can be easily misused.
@ Brainwaves: Interesting point. So essentially your argument for the first point is, even if we distribute the number of hours, consumption will vary. So the payment should also be linked to consumption.
The tariff system you are proposing is also interesting (even accounting for lack of technology to actually implement that) but the problem is the government is not allowed to be concerned about profit. Also this goes against the equality principle in basic necessities. I doubt if there is any country which charges differential rates for domestic consumption (differential rates exist for industries/agriculture). What will be the political impact of ignoring the masses?
this is a classical problem in the networking world and you will run into the type of problems as brainwaves suggested... In a "broadcast" network like electricity, the only way for optimal distribution is to use over-subscription...
It may not be as simple as taking someone's current and giving it to an industry, for example... You may need many individuals to give up/trade their power to fuel 1 industry or plant...The bottom line question is, how much current is drawn during different times of the day...If you know that number, then it is a matter of supplying just that current without overloading the source... But then, given that the regular distribution of electricity assumes such over-subscription already, then it is a matter of pushing the bounds of it during crunch time which is difficult... This is why we need internet to carry electricity...:) [it is not really a joke...checkout http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3251.txt]
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