An Overall Assessment of the Responsiveness of Households to Time-of-Use Electricity Rates: The Ontario Experiment

From 1982 to 1988, Ontario Hydro implemented a residential rate experiment. This paper provides a discussion of results obtained from econometric models which to date have yielded information on the experimental changes in residential load shapes. The results take the form of elasticities, percentage impacts, load changes at the household level and simulated province-wide load changes. The paper includes comparisons of results with other jurisdictions, comparisons of impacts on households with and without electric heating and with and without air conditioning, and comparisons across rate treatments with varying lengths of peak periods and relative prices. A fundamental conclusion is that time-of-use electricity rates do make a difference in residential load shapes.