In the last few years we have seen electricity generation plants being slowly decentralised and becoming more distributed across the country. This is moving away from the traditional concept of the plant being located centrally in the network and all electricity being supplied from that point.

The Government has set its targets to reduce CO2 emissions in order to comply with the limits laid out by the Kyoto Protocol. Taking its part in the overall strategy, generation from renewable resources has been highlighted as a way to help bring about the necessary reductions in the country's emissions.

The UK is fortunate in its location as it can call upon a great deal of natural resources that could be put to good use generating electricity. The large wind resource in the UK is beginning to be harnessed as one of the main forms of renewable energy that will be used to reduce the national CO2 emissions.

Harnessing power from the natural resources does not only apply at the large scale. There has been a real interest in embedding generation plant close to the point of consumption, which will generate power for the local community. This approach has been adopted and applied to individual buildings so that the embedded generation offsets their electricity demand and in some cases can be a source of income as any excess electricity generated can be sold to power utilities.

However, with constantly changing weather, the potential for generating electricity also changes. With these changes, there can be difficulty in matching the supply from these sources to the demand from the community. As the uptake of this type of technology becomes more widespread there will have to be systems and procedures developed to facilitate Demand Side Management in order to keep the two balanced and allow the community to best take advantage of the peak generating conditions.

Our group has been developing a step by step methodology of how to implement Demand Side Management and control in small grids or networks which are supplied by embedded generation. Our methodology draws on existing approaches and is our proposed solution to remove the problematic peaks that occur in demand profiles that aggregate across the community to give large temporal peaks.

The methodology should help those interested in Demand Side Management, from energy professionals to those only starting to become interested in the area. The process can be applied to a range of selected projects, from individual buildings up to a small community.