Evaluating the Energy-Saving Effects of a Utility Demand-Side Management Program: A Difference-in-Difference Coarsened Exact Matching Approach

Richard Boampong

The Energy Journal, 2020, vol. Volume 41, issue Number 4, 185-208

Abstract: This paper seeks to estimate the energy-saving effect of a Demand-Side Management program, specifically Gainesville Regional Utility's (GRU) high-efficiency central Air Conditioner (AC) rebate program in which GRU offers incentives to its customers to replace their old, low-efficiency AC unit with a high-efficiency model. We use a difference-in-difference coarsened exact matching approach to reduce the imbalance of pre-treatment characteristics between treated and control households. We find substantial annual energy savings of the high-efficiency AC program. We disaggregate the energy-saving effects into summer peak effects, winter peak effects, and non-peak effects. The results indicate that the summer peak effects are substantial and statistically significant while there are little or no statistically significant effects of the program on winter peak demand. Also, by following program participants over a three-year period, we find that there is no statistically significant rebound effect of the high-efficiency AC rebate program.

JEL-codes: F0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/ejarticle.aspx?id=3532 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to IAEE members and subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aen:journl:ej41-4-boampong

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/ejsearch.aspx

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The Energy Journal from International Association for Energy Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by David Williams ().