In the liberalised
market, the wholesale hourly price of electricity will be defined in
real time, giving a signal of the effective available resources in
each moment of the year. Though most customers will not see this
hourly variability on their bill, wholesale prices are likely to act
as a benchmark and to influence the structure of retail agreements and
retail tariffs. Moreover, the efficiency of the wholesale market will
also depend on the aggregate demand elasticity, which is affected by
retail pricing policies and by the effective willingness to shift
consumption over time by the end user. This paper focuses on the
measurement of final customer demand responsiveness, analysing monthly
data on medium size Italian industrial consumers facing TOU pricing
between 2000 and 2003. The econometric model employs a nested Constant
Elasticity of Substitution (CES) input demand function, which allows
estimating substitutability of electricity usage across different
hourly intervals within a month and across different months. The
results show that monthly substitutability is easier than hourly
substitutability, and highlight a wide heterogeneity in customer
response, suggesting that different pricing policies may be pursued
across different industrial sectors. |