A thesis report submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering

Thesis (M.Eng.) - Asian Institute of Technology

Owing to the rapid economic growth in the last few years together with peoples' growing awareness of environmental protection, Taipower is encountering a series of difficulties of power shortages and severe protests against building new generating facilities. Also, many industrial and commercial customers together with some residential customers have already experienced bitter power shortages. Time-Of-Use (TOU) tariff rate structure was introduced twelve years ago for implementing the goal of demand-side management. A number of technologies exist that can help both the TOU customers to reduce electricity cost and the Taipower to avoid setting up new power plants while supplying electricity. Potential applications of a few of these technologies in two selected industries in Taiwan have been covered in this study. Results of the study show that technologies such as vapor absorption chillers, vapor compression chillers using waste streams of the plant can provide high internal rate of return of over 60% and the investments can be recovered within a year or two. The industries should implement these in order to minimize the energy cost in production. Other technologies such as cogeneration or heat pumps using off-peak electricity have payback periods ranging from 3 to 7 years and the internal rate of return are of the order 10 to 30%. These may not be attractive to the industries because their investment may be in direct competition with those linked with plant's production I expansion capacity. Suitable schemes should be provided by the sectional authorities in order to encourage the implementation of load shi fting technologies that win benefit both Taipower as well as individual industries.