Effects of In-home Displays on Residential Electricity Consumption

Abstract

This chapter investigates how acquiring information from in-home displays (IHDs) affects electricity usage through attention and learning, using the experimental data on the frequency of consumers’ use of IHDs in summer 2012 and winter 2012/2013. Households in the treatment group could see a graph of their half-hourly electricity consumption in real time with IHDs at any time during the experiment. The immediate effect of IHDs is heightened household attention to information on electricity consumption, and the repetition of attention is expected to improve households’ capacity to process information in the long run. The estimation results of the daily time-of-day electricity consumption model indicate statistically significant and persistent effects of IHD use on residential electricity consumption. The increase in IHDs’ effects along with households’ experience of using IHDs implies that households’ capacity to process information could be improved by the repetition of attention to electricity information. Contrary to the energy-conservation literature, IHD usage was found to consistently increase residential electricity consumption because of a boomerang effect. However, an interactive effect of providing IHDs and critical peak pricing implies that providing an IHD together with pecuniary incentive schemes could be effective in energy conservation.