Electricity Consumption of Members in a Newly Developed Top-Down Energy Community
NEWCOMERS Deliverable 5.1
This study investigates to what extent the membership in an energy community induces energy conservation. It is the first study to explore this relationship in a randomized controlled field experiment, in which random assignment into the energy community allows for the estimation of the causal effect of community membership on electricity conservation. In our randomized controlled trial, we co-created the energy community in collaboration with GEN-I, the largest electricity utility in Slovenia. GEN-I asked around 10,000 of their customers if they would like to take part in a research study. Of the more than 1,000 customers who were willing to participate, we chose 300 customers to be part of the core study. Of these 300, half of the participants were randomly assigned to the newly developed energy community. It is therefore a top-down energy community that could in principle be set up in a similar way by any energy utility in Europe.
NEWCOMERS project