Field Experimentation on the Demand Side of Electricity Markets

The demand-side of electricity markets has an important role to play in advancing our progress towards cleaner and more reliable electric power systems. Across the country, and across the world, governments are implementing policies designed to improve demand-side energy efficiency and enable more efficient electricity demand-response. Measuring the impacts and relative effectiveness of these programs is complicated because it requires a credible "counterfactual" estimate of the energy consumption patterns that would have manifest absent these policies.

This talk will discuss how randomized field experiments are being used to evaluate the impacts of energy efficiency and demand response programs. In particular, ongoing work that evaluates residential energy retrofits, time varying electricity pricing, and appliance upgrades in a rural electrification context, will be highlighted. Strengths and limitations of experimental approaches to evaluating these demand-side interventions will be discussed.

Speaker: Meredith Fowlie is an Associate Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Berkeley