Customer acceptance of smart electricity tariffs : preliminary results of a choice experiment

As consumers are free to choose the tariffs which they prefer, the impact of different tariff structures on consumer behaviour is influenced by the extent to which consumers decide to: • sign up for a tariff and accept the associated levels of price risk and outage risk • change their behaviour in response to the tariff by investing in and operating automation systems • change their behaviour in response to the tariff by adopting different routines or investing in more efficient devices Within this paper we present the results from a Discrete Choice Experiment with a representative sample of 582 households. We investigate how different aspects of price and outage risk as well as risk preferences affect consumers’ choices on electricity tariffs, including Critical Peak Pricing, Peak-time Rebate, Real-time Pricing, and Capped Real-time Pricing. We also examine the impact of risk framing (e.g. WTP and WTA) and tariff structures on different forms of energy consumption behaviour change