Den Heijer, W., North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa; Grobler, L., North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa
Service level adjustments are essential to keep measurement and verification project baselines "updated" with the actual service level that a system provides. In the case of a DSM load shift project on a mine pumping system, it is standard procedure to use a service level adjustment based on daily kWh neutrality. The case study discussed in this article showed that the project achieved impacts in the order of 12.9 MW when the baseline was adjusted in this manner.This approach, however, rested on the assumption that system efficiencies remained unchanged since the DSM intervention was only supposed to shift the system load to other time-of-use periods outside the evening peak period.However, it was found that system efficiency did change by almost 13 percent in this project's case. A service level adjustment approach was consequently required that linked the baseline energy use to the actual service level of the system, which was the daily volume of water pumped out of the mine.The utilization of this SLA adjustment not only allowed the M&V team to determine the project impacts due to the load shift activities, but also to capture the impacts due to the increased system efficiency. The impact determined for the same month, but with a different SLA, consequently increased to 15.1 MW.