Load Curtailment Get Paid to Reduce Your Electric Load

Abstract

Since the summer of 1997, some utilities and Independent System
Operators (ISOs) have been faced with situations where they must pay
very high wholesale prices for power they need to balance supply and
demand. To minimize the cost of doing so, they may request that some
customers curtail their loads. In the past, customers did so voluntarily
and were typically not paid. In many cases, the response was insufficient
to bring wholesale market prices down to reasonable levels. Note that
this differs from interruptible electric service under which some large
industrial customers were required to reduce load (in exchange for a
general discount on the rest of their power) or else pay heavy fines.