Extreme temperatures have a way of making people appreciate their utilities. Nobody wants to lose air conditioning during a heatwave or home heating during a cold spell. But Michigan residents faced a one-two punch on January 30, 2019. A fire broke out at the utility station that was set to provide more than half of […]
by Dylan Brewer This June, New York City’s government and utility urged households to conserve electricity during an extreme heat wave with temperatures reaching 100 degrees F.[1] People were asked to set air conditioners to 76 degrees, to avoid using more than one air conditioning unit, and to delay using electricity-hungry appliances during peak cooling […]
Residential rooftop solar adoption can paradoxically lead to higher total electricity consumption than expected because “free” PV electricity lowers household energy costs, prompting some additional usage. EPIcenter affiliate Oliver and his Georgia Tech colleague Toroghi propose an innovative method that pairs economic demand modeling with high-resolution GIS PV potential analysis to estimate this “direct rebound […]
Our electrical grid—already under stress from climate‐amplified storms and the push to renewables—is a critical lifeline. Yet outages are costly, and until now, our best measures of how much U.S. households are truly willing to pay to avoid losing power (their “value of lost load,” or VoLL) came from surveys and macroeconomic models, offering wildly […]
A recent study by Matthew E. Oliver from the Georgia Institute of Technology and his co-authors, Juan Moreno-Cruz from the University of Waterloo and Kenneth Gillingham from Yale University, delves into the solar rebound effect. The “solar rebound effect” is a phenomenon where households with residential solar photovoltaic (PV) systems end up consuming more electricity in response to greater solar energy […]
In a study by a Georgia Tech economist that could help inform future energy policy, half the participants cranked their thermostats despite knowing exactly how much each extra degree would cost them. Prices are typically the first tool used to get people to save energy, noted Dylan Brewer, assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Economics. […]
People using energy-efficient smart thermostats are willing to sacrifice comfort and control to save relatively small amounts of energy that could add up if enough people sign on, a Georgia Tech economist reported in a recent study. With federal and state energy policies targeting aggressive decarbonization in the next 15 years, smart technologies have the […]