Regional Impacts of Energy Conservation Policies

This chapter assesses the impact of applying critical peak pricing (CPP), in-home displays (IHDs), and home energy reports (HERs) to consumers living in the Kansai region based on the empirical results of field experiments presented in the previous chapters. For CPP, households with standard and all-electric contracts in the Kansai region are assumed to have paid peak prices ranging from 65 to 105 U.S. cents/kWh (1 U.S. dollar = 100 yen) for 16 days in summer 2013 and 21 days in winter 2013/2014. On these days, these households are assumed to use IHDs once a day. The combination of CPP and IHDs would have reduced residential electricity usage during the peak period by approximately 15.0 % in summer 2013 and 19.7 % in winter 2013/2014. Overall, the effects of CPP together with IHD usage on the peak electricity demand (kilowatt) would be far larger than the effects of the government’s call for a voluntary reduction. HERs are expected to reduce residential electricity consumption, thus, by applying HERs that include a peer comparison of electricity usage and personalized conservation tips to households contracting all-electric in the Kansai region in June 2013, a household would have saved 4.9–8.3 %. The cost effectiveness of HERs, which is defined as the implementation costs of HERs per electricity saving, would have been far larger in the region than that in the United States.