The Energy-Smart Pricing Plan (ESPP) was started in January 2003, and was the firsttime in the nation that residential customers were given the opportunity to pay market-basedelectricity prices. By exposing residential customers to the market-price of electricity,customer's are given the opportunity to make informed decisions about electricity use. Thisprogram uses Commonwealth Edison's (ComEd's) experimental Residential Hourly EnergyPricing (RHEP) rate. In addition to the hourly electricity price, participants receive a distributioncharge which is currently capped at 4.88 and 5.367 cents per kWh for single family andmultifamily homes, respectively. Program participants' rates are reduced by 1.4 cents/kWh as aparticipation incentive. Through this feature, participants could save about 10% of their currentelectric costs even if they do not change their energy use patterns at all in response to the hourlyenergy prices.This paper presents the quantitative and process assessments of the ESPP using statisticalmodeling of hourly consumption data and survey responses. Through this evaluation, we havefound that residential customers do indeed respond to hourly price signals, even relatively smallones.
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