2 HOUSEHOLD RESPONSE TO DYNAMIC PRICING OF ELECTRICITY—A SURVEY OF THE EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE Since the energy crisis of 2000-2001 in the western United States, much attention has been given to boosting demand response in electricity markets. One of the best ways to let that happen is to pass through wholesale energy costs to retail customers. This can be accomplished by letting retail prices vary dynamically, either entirely or partly. For the overwhelming majority of customers, that requires a changeout of the metering infrastructure, which may cost as much as $40 billion for the US as a whole. While a good portion of this investment can be covered by savings in distribution system costs, about 40 percent may remain uncovered. This investment gap could be covered by reductions in power generation costs that could be brought about through demand response. Thus, state regulators in many states are investigating whether customers will respond to the higher prices by lowering demand and if so, by how much. To help inform this assessment, we survey the evidence from the 15 most recent experiments with dynamic pricing of electricity. We find conclusive evidence that households (residential customers) respond to higher prices by lowering usage. The magnitude of price response depends on several factors, such as the magnitude of the price increase, the presence of central air conditioning and the availability of enabling technologies such as two-way programmable communicating thermostats and always-on gateway systems that allow multiple end-uses to be controlled remotely. Across the range of experiments studied, time-of-use rates induce a drop in peak demand that ranges between three to six percent and critical-peak pricing tariffs induce a drop in peak demand that ranges between 13 to 20 percent. When accompanied with enabling technologies, the latter set of tariffs lead to a drop in peak demand in the 27 to 44 percent range.1.0 INTRODUCTION The optimality of peak load pricing of electricity is well established in the literature on public utility economics.2 To maximize the social surplus, prices during the off peak period should be set equal to the marginal cost of energy and prices during the peak period should be set equal to the marginal cost of energy and capacity. However, practice has vastly lagged theory. There are several reasons, with the foremost being the cost of installing the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) that would allow peak load pricing to be implemented. For the US as a whole, this cost may be as high as $40 billion, as shown later. 2 For a survey, see Crew, Fernando and Kleindorfer (1995). A case for dynamic as opposed to static time-varying rates was provided by Vickrey (1971). Chao (1983) introduced uncertainty into the analysis. Littlechild (2003) made a case for passing through wholesale costs to retail customers. Borenstein (2005) compared the efficiency gains of dynami
c and static time-varying rates.
3
But an equally important reason is political
, which stems from the fear of a consumer
backlash that could ensue as high
er peak prices are implemented.
3
Of course, lower off-peak
prices would be implemented simu
ltaneously so that the customer
with the load profile of the
class would see no change in bill. In fact, thos
e with higher load factors than the class profile
would see lower bills. But those with poorer load
factors would be instan
t losers (unless they
curtailed peak usage) and that problem
has stymied innovate rate design.
However, there are signs of change in the po
licy-setting environment.
It is now widely
recognized that the ener
gy crisis in the Western US that
occurred during the years 2000-01 was
caused in part by a failure to engage the dema
nd side of the California power market. When
prices skyrocketed in wholesale markets, reta
il customers had no incentiv
e to reduce demand.
Governor Gray Davis famously observed that he
could have solved the cr
isis in 20 minutes had
he been able to pass through the rising prices to
customers. By freezing retail prices, he rendered
inoperative the automatic stabiliz
er that could have brought
demand and supply back into
balance.
4
After the crisis, twenty one economists put forward a manifesto which argued:
5
Any structural model for the industry should include a mechanism for charging consumers for the cost of
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