Paul M. Eldridge writes:

Nowhere did I say these ovens would operate at reduced power upon
start-up. Each could continue to operate at full power for as long it
takes to come up to temperature, then drop to the lowest wattage
required to maintain a constant set temperaturer; if the oven element
is rated at 3,000 watts and it normally cycles on one-third of the
time, then it's fair to say a constant 1,000 watts is all that's
needed to maintain a steady temperature from this point forward.
There would be absolutely no inconvenience to the consumer whatsoever
and the utility would still benefit from reduced aggregate load.

No, the load on the utility (averaged over 100000 houses) is still 100
MW, no matter whether the ovens elements are cycling on and off every
1/120 sec or every 2 minutes. Because of the randomness of the
mechanical thermostat open/close, you'll never get more than about 1/3
of those ovens on at any one instant.

In fact, I will bet that the utility would be mightily *unhappy* to
have 100 MW of load all switch on for the last 1/3 of every half-cycle
of the line. That will distort the waveform on the grid.

Thus, if we can effectively reduce peak demand from by just ***ONE***
MW, the capital savings to the utility is a minimum of $367,000.00 US
($436,730.00 CDN); at 67 MW, the savings amount to $CDN 29.3 million.

But you haven't reduced peak demand at all. In fact, you've increased
it slightly due to losses in the triacs of the electronic control, and
distorted the current waveform.

Dave