Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
4.3 Information Systems
Regarding energy performance certi
cates or labeling systems, the main limitation
is the lack of complete databases containing information on household energy
consumption and availability of electric stock. Since energy performance certi
-
cates have been mainly used at the residential level to distinguish buildings,
appliances or vehicles, the major challenge for governments is the development of
multi-year surveys that collect information about household energy consumption
and energy ef
ciency products. Such databases would allow us to identify changes
in energy consumption due to the introduction of this policy measure. Due to such
limitation, analysts have focused on estimating the willingness to pay of consumers
for energy ef
cient products. It is expected that if consumers are willing to pay
more for certi
ed products this is because they are correctly recognizing and
including the information provided in such certi
cates among their preferences and,
hence, certi
cates are successfully providing information.
Most of these studies focus on buildings and appliances and, depending on the
source of data used for such purpose, the literature can be classi
ed in two groups:
on the one hand studies that apply the hedonic price method with real data and, on
the other hand, studies that generate data using experimental techniques. The for-
mer have been applied for commercial buildings, mainly in the US and some Asian
countries [
11
,
17
,
25
,
29
,
30
,
79
] and for appliances and vehicles in Spain [
34
,
35
];
while the later have been used for the residential sector, especially in Europe [
1
,
2
,
5
,
51
,
67
]. The
ndings of the majority of these studies
nd a signi
cant positive
willingness to pay for such products.
Finally, as it was mentioned in Sect.
3
, there are some other informational
mechanisms to reduce energy consumption in residential sector that are also gaining
attention for policymakers and empirical researchers, particularly billing informa-
tion and smart meters. Since individual behavior is a main determinant for the
effectiveness of these instruments, and real data is missing due to a lack of expe-
riences, experimental techniques have been the most common approach to evaluate
them. In particular, there are several
eld experiments that estimate changes in
energy consumption due to the introduction of smart meters [
22
,
36
,
50
,
75
]or
billing information [
3
,
59
,
69
]. It is worth mentioning a large randomized natural
eld experiment carried out by Allcott [
3
] among 600,000 households across the
US which found an average 2 % reduction of energy consumption by households
whose electricity bill included information about the consumption of their neigh-
bors. Similar effects were found by Houde et al. [
42
] for California, with an average
5.5 % decrease in electricity consumption by households who received detailed
information through an innovative web interface developed by Google.
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