Demand Side Management Research Paper

ojects that involve the implementation of a technology or process that uses less energy to achieve the same quality of output. Energy effi-ciency plans have the primary goal of decreasing the overall energy consumption in the medium/long term [4]. An example of an energy efficiency project is replacing incan-descent light bulbs with energy saving compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs, this will save energy and cost while maintaining the quality of service. For mass roll out energy efficiency projects it is beneficial for governments or utility companies to minimise the cost of the project while maximising the number of people who adopt this project. The propagation of information within a social network can speed up the rate of adoption of a project.

Demand side management has to consider the technical, organisational and behavioural solutions that will help decrease energy consumption and demand. These measures are implemented mostly for short term which saves the generator units from being started and shut down at short periods to meet the demand. The benefits of DSM include but not limited to the reduction of customer bill, air pollution, heavy investment on power plants and grid congestion [19], [20], [21]. The measures also create job opportunities through innovation and technology to produce energy efficient appliances. The tools used in DSM measures are real time pricing, time of use (TOU) tariff, smart metering and web-based or communication systems [19]. The authors of [22] point out that the success of energy efficiency begins with information and insight into the efficiency process

Small world describes the real network as having short distances between nodes despise the fact that the network could actually be large. For social networks, Stanley Milgram discovered this interesting trait when he performed an experiment and concluded that there are six degrees of separation between any two individuals in the United States of America. A recent study from [30] shows that due to the fact that the world has become a "global village" the degree of separation has reduced to four from the experiments they performed on over 10 million Facebook (an internet social network) users. Let us note here that that is about one sixth of the world’s population.

The research is going to concentrate on social networks. This is because when con-sidering the spread of information about energy efficiency and calculating the energy saved due to these spread of information, social networks best fit the criteria for the type of network to be studied.

The focus of this research is to quantify the total expected energy savings of energy efficiency projects. The savings are divided into direct and indirect savings. The in-direct savings focus on the savings due to non-technical activities that led to those savings. There are many applications of complex networks in real life case studies. Examples of such applications are epidemic spreading, rumour spreading opinion form-ation etc.

2.5.1 SOCIAL