• Research
  • People
  • Publications
  • Developed tools
  • Opportunities
  • Links
  • Research
  • People
  • Publications
  • Developed tools
  • Opportunities
  • Links

Publications

For an updated list of publications, please visit Dr Muller's Google Scholar page
Papers in review are marked with an asterisk (*).
Student and postdoc mentees are underlined and marked with #
Click on the title to access abstract, then click on the authors to access preprints

11. Estimating the price (in)elasticity of off-grid electricity demand

6/19/2021

 
Müller, M.F. , Thompson, S.E. , Gadgil A.J, (2018), Development Engineering, , doi: 10.1016/j.deveng.2017.12.001
Community-scale power infrastructure may be the only electrification option for tens of millions households that remain out of reach from centralized power grids. The responsiveness of household electricity demand to price is a crucial design input for off-grid systems. While the price elasticity of electricity demand of grid-connected consumers has been abundantly studied, few studies focus on off-grid communities where substantial econometric challenges arise, including the absence of metered consumption data and electricity prices that are simultaneously determined by cost and demand considerations. This study attempts to address these challenges for the case of off-grid micro hydropower consumers. It makes two core contributions: First, we propose the surface area of the contributing hydrologic catchment as a new instrumental variable to estimate elasticity using a cross sectional dataset of existing micro hydropower infrastructure. Second, we provide a first price-elasticity estimate (−0.15) for off-grid electricity demand in Nepal. We surmise that the small (in absolute value) elasticity value found in this study arises from the low levels of consumption observed off-the-grid. We use a Monte Carlo analysis to show that failing to account for this disparity can lead to substantial financial losses caused by suboptimal power infrastructure design.

Comments are closed.

    Categories

    All
    Armed Conflict
    Bangladesh
    Cambodia
    Catchment Science
    Causal Inference
    Change Attribution
    Climate Change
    Flow Duration Curve
    Food
    Game Theory
    Geostatistics
    Global Health
    Groundwater
    Himalaya
    Large Scale Land Aquisition
    Micro Hydropower
    Middle East
    Nepal
    Remote Sensing
    Reviews And Opinion Papers
    Rural Electrification
    Salinization
    Sociohydrology
    South Asia
    Stochastic Hydrology
    Streamflow Variability
    Switzerland
    Transboundary Water
    Water System Analysis
    Web Platform

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.