Invites you to an

AERE Reading Group seminar

presented by

Gordon Leslie

(Monash University)

 Incentivising within-day shifting of household electricity use

Thursday 4 October 2023

12.30pm – 1.30pm

Level 6 Seminar Room (650)

A02 Social Sciences Building

Camperdown Campus
The University of Sydney NSW 2006

 Zoom: 835 1427 3859

Energy users in jurisdictions with solar energy booms can create value by shifting electricity consumption to the sunny and increasingly low-cost daytime and away from times when the sun has set. Yet most households face fixed-price electricity tariffs, despite within-day wholesale price variation often being predictable, and occasionally being extreme. We conduct a randomized control trial with over 6000 Australian households via a real-time electricity smartphone app to measure how households respond to incentives to shift their energy use to low-cost periods away from high-cost periods. We find significant consumption responses by households on ad hoc event days that are comparable to the response magnitude by households that are offered incentives every day. This demonstrates that households that are able to track their consumption in real-time can be very flexible in adjusting their consumption at relatively short notice, thus providing support for the implementation of demand response programs that closely track system conditions. We show that rooftop solar installations are a strong predictor of responses, whereby households without rooftop solar are not responsive to all incentive designs, with consumption unchanged by small incentives to use less in peak evening hours. In contrast, households with rooftop solar respond to peak shave incentives even if they are of a non-monetary nature. Exploiting data on household app engagement and self-reported measures of program engagement shows that solar households are more engaged with their energy use before and throughout the program, and that they have a greater capacity to load shift.

Our full seminar program is available at:
http://sydney.edu.au/arts/economics/research/seminars.shtml

 For further information contact:

AERE Reading Group Seminar Coordinator

Alastair Fraser ||email: alastair.fraser@sydney.edu.au

For all upcoming seminars in School of Economics see Our events and Calendar