The impact of public health measures on household energy consumption: The case of the UK COVID-19 tier system

Kentaro Florian Mayr and Paolo Agnolucci

Energy Economics, 2024, vol. 138, issue C

Abstract: Substantial attention has been paid to household energy consumption during COVID-19 lockdowns, however, there exists a dearth of studies on the impact of more granular health restrictions; understanding the consequences of differentiated health measures is important for policymakers and grid operators alike. We investigate the marginal impact of additional restrictions by studying the COVID-19 tier system of the UK. Each additional tier tightened applicable rules and imposed more restrictions to many aspects of life, such as the types of social interactions that were permissible and which stores were allowed to operate. We use the novel vector matching method, which enables causal identification of treatment effects in cases of multiple ordinal treatments. Our results indicate that moving from a low-restrictions environment to a medium and high restriction environment increased electricity consumption by 18% to 45%, respectively. These increases in consumption manifest predominantly between 9AM to 5PM, even when remaining home is not required by the measures in place. The changes in behaviour resulting from additional restrictions would amount to 0.57 £/day (＋18%) and 1.41 £/day (＋45%) when transitioning from low to medium and high restrictions, respectively.

Keywords: Public health measures; Household electricity consumption; COVID-19; Tier system (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 D69 I18 Q41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140988324004961
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:eneeco:v:138:y:2024:i:c:s0140988324004961

DOI: 10.1016/j.eneco.2024.107788

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Economics is currently edited by R. S. J. Tol, Beng Ang, Lance Bachmeier, Perry Sadorsky, Ugur Soytas and J. P. Weyant

More articles in Energy Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().