Most US consumers are charged a near-constant retail price for electricity, despite substantial hourly variation in the … wholesale market price. This paper evaluates the first program to expose residential consumers to hourly real-time pricing (RTP …). I find that enrolled households are statistically significantly price elastic and that consumers responded by conserving …

energy consumption by 2.0%. The program provides additional evidence that non-price interventions can substantially and cost … effectively change consumer behavior: the effect is equivalent to that of a short-run electricity price increase of 11 to 20%, and …