Let's introduce you to our tools for participating in Pennsylvania’s Act 129 demand response program. If you’re also participating in PJM’s Economic program, you may want to review that training first.
We built our tools to make it easy for you to understand your curtailment options, easily schedule your participation in events, and review your performance.
Curtailment Planning
Our Curtailment Planning tool is designed like a worksheet to help you plan and understand your curtailment actions.
For each registration in the program, you can create multiple scenarios that reflect your curtailment options, each with their own names and descriptions.
For every scenario, you can choose the days, time, and duration scenarios can be used for, based on your usage patterns and ability to curtail. CPower will notify you based on the availability selected for each Scenario.
It’s also possible to switch a Scenario from Active to Inactive. This is useful for turning on and off seasonal curtailment scenarios. Inactive scenarios aren't considered for earning opportunities.
On the Planning page you’ll see the list of Curtailment Actions. These are actions identified by your facility’s team along with CPower's energy engineering team for curtailing load. Each action has a descriptive title, a category, and a kilowatt value that roughly represents how much this action curtails.
These Curtailment actions are shared between all the scenarios for a registration. From the list, you can toggle on and off actions for the scenario. You can also create new actions, or edit existing actions by selecting Edit / Create Actions. When you’re done adding or editing actions, select Save Actions.
Now, the actions we’ve selected here contribute to the Estimated Load Drop for this scenario. This manually-entered kW value is what CPower uses to determine the size of your earning opportunity based on energy market prices and your ability to curtail. REMEMBER this load drop value is not necessarily just the sum of each of the action kilowatt values, as curtailment actions may interact with each other and be affected by the weather.
Scheduling an Act 129 Event
Here’s the scheduling tool – here, you can select the hours you want to schedule participation for Act 129 events. If you followed a link from the notification email, we’ll start with the scenario you selected. You can review all your scenarios and their potential earnings by clicking on the Scenario button, and choose which scenario to schedule from the list in the tray. You can also use this tool to make changes to the current day’s schedule and review past performance and earnings by changing the date from the date picker.
On the scheduling chart, you can see your calculated usage baseline for the selected day in dark grey. As your energy usage is recorded, you can see it as a blue line. Along the bottom of the chart, we show hourly local energy prices, first for the day-ahead market, then the real-time prices as they fill in during the day. When prices go up, the bars go up, and change color along a heat scale, yellow through red, indicating the size of the earning opportunity.
We’ve labeled everything underneath the chart, and given you the ability to toggle on and off anything you want to see.
For scheduling, every hour has its own checkbox that can be marked to schedule participation. You can schedule an operating hour until it’s 5 minutes away. Once hours can’t be scheduled, the checkbox is disabled. If you're participating in PJM Economic DR, you will not be able to schedule Economic participation during Act 129 events. Event hours will be filled in green. When you’ve decided which hours to schedule, select the Submit Schedule button to Schedule your participation. Hours you’ve scheduled will be filled in blue. You will also see the curtailment scenario’s load drop value subtracted from your baseline for these hours, so it is easy to visualize target usage for the scenario’s projected hours.
Below the chart, you’ll see CPower’s best, up-to-date estimate on what you will earn from your submitted schedule, based on your participation and real-time market prices.