<p>Dynamic pricing is increasingly adopted in the electricity sector, as it promotes renewable energy integration and aligns retail prices with wholesale market prices, enhancing pricing fairness. However, its successful application in the residential electricity sector raises two major challenges: non-responsive or otherwise inflexible households may face increased costs, and the real-time disclosure of consumption data may enable non-intrusive load monitoring and, consequently, behavioral profiling. This study adopts the perspective of the market regulator and proposes a set of design and auditing mechanisms to mitigate the adverse effects of dynamic pricing. First, it derives protection-by-design admissibility constraints for common dynamic pricing families that rule out structures incentivizing suppliers to target non-responsive households. Second, this work introduces an audit procedure that calibrates heterogeneous pricing policies to yield the same expected supplier profit over a baseline population of non-responsive consumers. This procedure facilitates comparison among tariff families and the identification of hidden markups that may encourage product proliferation and influence consumer choice. Third, it identifies the aggregated consumption statistics required to support billing under different policies, thereby addressing the privacy concerns by minimizing the consumer data accessed by the supplier. The proposed regulatory governance interventions are demonstrated in an empirical application using one year of hourly consumption data from 211 Greek households and the corresponding Hellenic Energy Exchange day-ahead market prices.</p>

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Pricing Systems for Residential Electricity Markets: Consumer Protection and Comparison of Pricing Policies

  • Ioannis Oikonomidis,
  • Athanasios Sakkas,
  • Dimitris Zissis

摘要

Dynamic pricing is increasingly adopted in the electricity sector, as it promotes renewable energy integration and aligns retail prices with wholesale market prices, enhancing pricing fairness. However, its successful application in the residential electricity sector raises two major challenges: non-responsive or otherwise inflexible households may face increased costs, and the real-time disclosure of consumption data may enable non-intrusive load monitoring and, consequently, behavioral profiling. This study adopts the perspective of the market regulator and proposes a set of design and auditing mechanisms to mitigate the adverse effects of dynamic pricing. First, it derives protection-by-design admissibility constraints for common dynamic pricing families that rule out structures incentivizing suppliers to target non-responsive households. Second, this work introduces an audit procedure that calibrates heterogeneous pricing policies to yield the same expected supplier profit over a baseline population of non-responsive consumers. This procedure facilitates comparison among tariff families and the identification of hidden markups that may encourage product proliferation and influence consumer choice. Third, it identifies the aggregated consumption statistics required to support billing under different policies, thereby addressing the privacy concerns by minimizing the consumer data accessed by the supplier. The proposed regulatory governance interventions are demonstrated in an empirical application using one year of hourly consumption data from 211 Greek households and the corresponding Hellenic Energy Exchange day-ahead market prices.