The goal of any load-management program is to maintain, as nearly as possible, a constant
level of load, thereby allowing the system load factor to approach 100%. The important
bene®ts of load management are reduction in maximum demand, reduction in power loss,
better equipment utilisation and saving through reduced maximum demand charges. Load
shifting, one of the simplest methods of load management, is to reduce customer demand
during the peak period by shifting the use of appliances and equipment to partial peak and
o-peak periods. Here no loads are being switched o, but only shifted or rescheduled, and
hence the total production is not aected. In this paper, a fully ¯edged program is developed
for load shifting and the same has been tried with the actual load data collected from a typical
fertiliser and chemical industry plant. # 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.