Shifting Household Power Demand Across Time

Integrating intermittent renewable generation on the path to net zero requires flexible electricity demand. In a randomized controlled trial in urban India, the authors provide households with simple Wi-Fi-enabled smart switches that control a single appliance. They then trigger automated switch-off events and reward participants for each unit of electricity they avoid consuming during an event, effectively paying them for the power they free up. Using data from nearly 1,000 households, the paper presented in this Decarbonization Seminar/Joint Seminar ZEW and MISES finds that switch-off events reduce appliance-level electricity use by 60% and household-level use by 8.5% during the event. The reduction is larger during hours of peak demand. Comparing household-level and appliance-level consumption, it finds no evidence of leakage, where users shift consumption to appliances not linked to the switch. Nor does it find evidence of load shifting on average, implying that switch-offs reduce total consumption rather than displace it. Combining new estimates of marginal emission factors with high-resolution generation cost data, this paper shows that optimally timed, automated switch-offs could deliver meaningful emission reductions at low or even negative cost.