Causal Tree Estimation of Heterogeneous Household Response to Time-Of-Use Electricity Pricing Schemes

2018/10/22 by Eoghan O’Neill, O'Neill, Eoghan, Melvyn Weeks +1
Energy · Engineering · #Energy Efficiency and Management #Energy, Environment, and Transportation Policies #FOS: Economics and business #General Economics (econ.GN) #Smart Grid Energy Management

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1810.09179

openalex publication_date 2018/10/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

We examine the household-specific effects of the introduction of Time-of-Use (TOU) electricity pricing schemes. Using a causal forest (Athey and Imbens, 2016; Wager and Athey, 2018; Athey et al., 2019), we consider the association between past consumption and survey variables, and the effect of TOU pricing on household electricity demand. We describe the heterogeneity in household variables across quartiles of estimated demand response and utilise variable importance measures. Household-specific estimates produced by a causal forest exhibit reasonable associations with covariates. For example, households that are younger, more educated, and that consume more electricity, are predicted to respond more to a new pricing scheme. In addition, variable importance measures suggest that some aspects of past consumption information may be more useful than survey information in producing these estimates.

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