Issues in the measurement of consumer response to time-of-use electricity pricing
Beginning in 1974, the Federal Energy Administration initiated sixteen residential Time-of-Use (TOU) pricing experiments. The purpose of these projects was to provide utilities with information on experiments have yielded a wealth of information on customer response, there remain a number of issues that have not been adequately addressed. The purpose of this research is to gather information on three of these issues: (1) many of the utilities currently considering residential TOU rates have not conducted a TOU experiment; thus, they cannot draw on their own experience to predict the effects of such rate structures on electricity demand; (2) the assumption that electricity usage can be treated as a homothetically separable (HS) branch of the consumer's utility function has been used extensively in modelling residential response to TOU pricing; this restriction has generally been imposed without testing because of limitations in the available data on non-electricity commodities; and (3) the primary goal of the TOU rate-demonstation projects was to provide information on electricity rates with time-differentiated energy charges; several projects, however, also experimented with tariffs including a demand charge for the customer's maximum rate of usage. A model of consumer preferences is developed and demonstrated that can be used to analyze and compare customer response to the two rate structures.
- OSTI ID:
- 5038912
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: Thesis (Ph. D.)
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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