Patent ID: 8433452

Claim:
In an electrical distribution system by which a utility supplies electricity to one or more pieces of equipment at each utility's customer's location, each piece of equipment placing an electrical load on the system when it is operating, a method of shedding electrical load placed on the system comprising: connecting at least one piece of equipment at a location to a load control apparatus; profiling by the load control apparatus, on a temporal basis, the electricity usage of the piece of equipment, said profiling being characterized not by the amount of energy consumed by the piece of equipment during a defined interval of time, but rather by the duration of time during each of successive predetermined intervals of time the piece of equipment was energized or de-energized with the resulting load profile including a plurality of time duration values of energization or de-energization with each value being specific to each of the successive predetermined intervals within the resulting load profile; when a load control event occurs in which load on the system must be shed, shedding load by the load control apparatus as a function of the resulting load profile created for the piece of equipment thereby to prevent system instability or overload, and to control operating costs of the system, and wherein the load shedding occurs during predetermined time intervals and wherein during each time interval of the event shedding load occurs as a function of the each value specific to a particular time interval within the resulting load profile associated with each of the predetermined time intervals of the load control event; and, if the load control event extends across more than one interval within the time period over which the energization profile is established, the amount of energy shed by the piece of equipment will differ if the profile indicates that the energization of the piece of equipment varies from the current interval to a succeeding interval.