Resource Planning (IRP) is a planning approach that has the potential to take a society-wide perspective, incorporate public participation in meaningful ways, and has a strong track record in creating plans that are low-cost, low risk, and with outcomes that minimize environmental and social impacts
IRP has close associations with energy efficiency: investing in helping customers to save electricity is typically considerably less expensive than building new power plants and fueling them for decades, and though the IRP process in itself is agnostic about whether demand-side options should be chosen over supply-side options, it is insistent that demand- and supply-side options for providing energy services to consumers must both be considered, and evaluated in an even-handed way. Utilities that rigorously implement IRP consistently report good news: there are many opportunities for energy efficiency investments, and IRP can
lead to substantially lower customer bills while avoiding the social and environmental disruptions and destruction that accompany new power plant construction and operation. Be forewarned: while IRP can be a very effective way of addressing evolving needs for electricity services, it is also based on principles and ideas that can challenge conventional culture in electric utilities and regulatory agencies.
Yet, these ideas speak for the need for reforms that align incentive structures and regulatory arrangements in ways that are consistent with the public interest to overcome the fundamental issue that electric utilities earn revenue selling electricity while energy efficiency measures threaten to lower utility revenues.
To better understand IRP, let’s start with a critical description Utility integrated resource plan staff must possess multiple talents to conduct and interpret the forecasts, analyses and formulation of recommendations that serve as their power organization’s compass heading to guide future actions. The resulting IRP documents they prepare fundamentally chart long-term directions to prescribe how load must be served in their service territory. The plan — while deeply rooted in quantitative methodology and established industry norms — must still be flexible enough to accommodate temporal shifts in trajectory triggered by technological, regulatory and methodological adjustments.
The past few years have witnessed the need for many such mid-course corrections in integrated resource planning methodology. The advance of renewable and distributed energy resources, slumping load growth, aggressive air quality regulations, greater emphasis on energy efficiency and demand side strategies — these and other shifts to what had been business as usual for utilities, have prompted innovations to the IRP process.
This program is designed by integrated resource planners for integrated resource planners. It will tackle the most pressing current resource planning issues through several case studies that will provide a solid survey of current thinking and methodologies as the basis for ensuring that current integrated resource plans measure up to a power organization’s future operational requirements. It will feature leading utility and other power resource planning professionals and experts addressing the key issues associated with these emerging operational environmental mandates, intermittent and variable energy resources, regulatory policies, and uncertainty factors.
For further information:
AREMA EVENTS - AREMA International s.r.o.
Praha 10 - Hostivar, Budapest'ská - 1491/5, PS? 102 00 - Czech Republic
alain.roy@aremagroup.com
