Appropriateness of EToU electricity tariff program for industrial type consumers: an investigation of cost benefit

Abstract

In mitigating the peak demand, the energy authority in Malaysia has introduced the enhanced time of use (EToU). However, the number of participants joining the programs is less than expected. Due to that reason, this study investigated the investment benefit in terms of electricity cost reduction when consumers subscribe to the EToU tariff scheme. The significant consumers from industrial tariff types have been focused on where the load profiles were collected from the incoming providers’ power stations. Meanwhile, ant colony optimization (ACO) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) are applied to optimize the load profiles reflecting EToU tariff prices. The proposed method had shown a reduction in electricity cost, and the most significant performance has been recorded congruently. For a maximum 30% load adjustment using ACO optimization, the electricity costs have been decreased by 10% (D type of tariff), 16% (E1 type of tariff), 9% (E2 kind of tariff), and 1.13% (E3 type of tariff) when compared to the existing conventional tariff. The cost-benefit of the EToU tariff switching has been identified where the simple payback period (SPP) is below one year for all the industrial types of consumers.