Policy brief: Leveraging Automation and Incentives to Enhance Power Demand Flexibility

We are pleased to share a new policy brief, Leveraging Automation and Incentives to Enhance Power Demand Flexibility, published through the Hitachi-Imperial Centre for Decarbonisation and Natural Climate Solutions (see the Centre’s publications).

The brief presents results from the POWBAL Tata trial, a randomised control trial run with residential customers of Tata Power. Wi-Fi connected power switches were rolled out to over 1,000 households in Delhi and Mumbai, with most participants (80%) choosing to connect an air conditioning unit.

Key findings include:

• Randomised, remotely triggered switch-off events reduced average household electricity demand by 8%, rising to as much as 15% during peak demand hours.
• Around 30% of users chose to override switch-off events, but there was no evidence of demand leakage to other appliances and no rebound effect afterwards.
• Higher reward rates did not lead to increased participation, and users did not respond differently to varying announcement periods.
• A counterfactual analysis finds an average CO₂ emission reduction of around 2.3% (over 3% in some households) and an average cost saving of 2.5%.
• Accounting for device and installation costs, the average net mitigation cost is -$23.1 per tonne of CO₂, with a negative net carbon mitigation cost for nearly three-quarters of households.

The brief concludes that household-level demand management can play an effective and economically meaningful role in the Indian electricity system.

Authored by Nilesh Kane, Shefali Khanna, Ralf Martin, Mirabelle Muûls, Praveer Sinha and Sujay Kumar Saha.

Read the full brief here.