“Commercial and Industrial Demand Response UnderMandatory Time-of-Use Electricity Pricing”AbstractThis paper is the first to evaluate the
impact of a large-scale field deployment of mandatory time of-use (TOU) pricing
on the energy use of commercial and industrial firms. The regulation imposes higher
user prices during hours when electricity is generally more expensive to
produce, and is the most common way for time-varying incentives to be
transmitted to retail electricity customers. We exploit a natural experiment
that arises from the rules governing the program to present evidence that TOU
pricing induced negligible change in overall usage, peak usage or peak load. As
such, economic efficiency was not increased by this regulation. Bill levels and
volatility exhibit only minor shifts, suggesting that concerns from advocacy
groups about increased expenditure and customer risk exposure have been
overstated.http://kkjessoe.ucdavis.edu/Research.htm.About the Speaker:Katrina
Jessoe is an assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural and
Resource Economics at UC Davis, where she specializes in environmental and
energy economics. Much of her research centers on the design and evaluation of
water regulations and time variant pricing in electricity markets. In her work,
she often collaborates with electric and water utilities, as well as state
agencies. Some recent and ongoing projects include the design of a randomized
field experiment to test the role of information on the price elasticity for
residential electricity, the analysis of time-variant pricing programs for
residential and commercial electricity customers, and the collection of water quality data from public
and state small systems to measure the impact of drinking water quality
regulations in California. She received a BA from Princeton University in 2002
and a PhD in Environmental and Resource Economics from Yale University if 2009.Please see Professor Jessoe’s website for more information.
