The electric commons: A qualitative study of community accountability

This study explores how energy might be conceptualised as a commons, a resource owned and managed by a community with a system of rules for production and consumption. It tests one aspect of Elinor Ostrom's design principles for successful management of common pool resources: that there should be community accountability for individual consumption behaviour. This is explored through interviews with participants in a community demand response (DR) trial in an urban neighbourhood in the UK. Domestic DR can make a contribution to balancing electricity supply and demand. This relies on smart meters, which raise vertical (individual to large organisation) privacy concerns. Community and local approaches could motivate greater levels of DR than price signals alone. We found that acting as part of a community is motivating, a conclusion which supports local and community based roll out of smart meters. Mutually supportive, voluntary, and anonymous sharing of information was welcomed. However, mutual monitoring was seen as an invasion of horizontal (peer to peer) privacy. We conclude that the research agenda, which asks whether local commons-based governance of electricity systems could provide social and environmental benefits, is worth pursuing further. This needs a shift in regulatory barriers and ‘governance-system neutral’ innovation funding

Are consumers willing to switch to smart time of use electricity tariffs? The importance of loss-aversion and electric vehicle ownership

Smart time of use tariffs are a key part of most government’s strategies to ensure our future electricity supply is clean, affordable and secure – but will consumers be willing to switch to them? This paper presents the results of a survey experiment conducted on a nationally representative sample of 2020 British energy bill payers. The data suggests that over a third of bill payers are in favour of switching to a 3-tiered smart time of use tariff, indicating a sizeable potential market for these tariffs. There is substantial variation in willingness to switch, driven by differences in loss-aversion and ownership of demand flexible appliances rather than standard socio-economic/demographic factors. This is the first time loss-aversion has been measured amongst energy bill payers and the results suggest loss-aversion is likely to stifle consumer uptake; 93% of bill payers are loss-averse (care more about avoiding financial losses than making savings) and loss-averse people are substantially less willing to switch to the time of use tariff (p < 0.001). A randomised control trial finds that loss-framed messages are unlikely to overcome loss-aversion to boost uptake. Marketing campaigns tailored towards electric vehicle owners, who were significantly more willing to switch, could increase uptake during and after the smart meter roll-out