The Incentive to Overinvest in Energy Efficiency: Evidence from Hourly Smart-Meter Data
研究发现，当家庭支付的电价边际价格高于社会边际成本时，会产生过度投资能源效率的激励。基于每小时智能电表数据，空调升级使平均用电量减少5%，但私人节省比社会节省平均高出140%，表明存在过度投资倾向。
Many households pay a marginal price for electricity that exceeds the marginal social cost of supplying that electricity. We show evidence that such pricing schemes can create an incentive to overinvest in energy efficiency. Using hourly smart-meter data for households facing time-invariant increasing block prices, we estimate how air conditioner upgrades affect electricity use. We find that the average participating household reduces consumption by 5%, which provides private savings in the form of lower electricity bills and social cost savings by decreasing generation and pollution costs. The private savings exceed the social savings by an average of 140%, so the average household is faced with an incentive to overinvest in energy efficiency. This incentive to overinvest in energy efficiency would be cut in half if consumers faced any one of three alternative pricing plans with lower marginal price but the same average price.