page_title: Load management
section_title: Australia and New Zealand
hierarchical_section_title: Load management / Examples of schemes / Australia and New Zealand
caption_attribution_description: English: An Enermet-National Gas Corporation single-phase ripple control receiver fitted to a house in New Zealand. This particular receiver operates at 283&#160;Hz and has two ripple-controlled circuit breakers - the left one controls the storage water heater supply (currently in the on position), and the right one controls the nightstore heater supply (currently in the off position). A tamper-evident seal is fitted to prevent tampering of the circuit breakers by the customer.
context_page_description: Load management, also known as demand-side management, is the process of balancing the supply of electricity on the network with the electrical load by adjusting or controlling the load rather than the power station output. This can be achieved by direct intervention of the utility in real time, by the use of frequency sensitive relays triggering the circuit breakers, by time clocks, or by using special tariffs to influence consumer behavior. Load management allows utilities to reduce demand for electricity during peak usage times, which can, in turn, reduce costs by eliminating the need for peaking power plants. In addition, some peaking power plants can take more than an hour to bring on-line which makes load management even more critical should a plant go off-line unexpectedly for example. Load management can also help reduce harmful emissions, since peaking plants or backup generators are often dirtier and less efficient than base load power plants. New load-management technologies are constantly under development — both by private industry and public entities.
context_section_description: Since the 1950s, Australia and New Zealand have had a system of load management based on ripple control, allowing the electricity supply for domestic and commercial water storage heaters to be switched off and on, as well as allowing remote control of nightstore heaters and street lights. Ripple injection equipment located within each local distribution network signals to ripple control receivers at the customer's premises. Control may either done manually by the local distribution network company in response to local outages or requests to reduce demand from the transmission system operator (i.e. Transpower), or automatically when injection equipment detects mains frequency falling below 49.2 Hz. Ripple control receivers are assigned to one of several ripple channels to allow the network company to only turn off supply on part of the network, and to allow staged restoration of supply to reduce the impact of a surge in demand when power is restored to water heaters after a period of time off.
  Depending on the area, the consumer may have two electricity meters, one for normal supply ("Anytime") and one for the load-managed supply ("Controlled"), with Controlled supply billed at a lower rate per kilowatt-hour than Anytime supply. For those with load-managed supply but only a single meter, electricity is billed at the "Composite" rate, priced between Anytime and Controlled.
caption: A ripple control receiver fitted to a New Zealand house. The left circuit breaker controls the water storage heater supply (currently on), while the right one controls the nightstore heater supply (currently off).
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