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“Commercial and Industrial Demand Response Under Mandatory Time-of-Use Electricity Pricing”AbstractThis paper is the first to evaluate the impact of a large-scale field deployment of mandatory time of-use (TOU) pricing on the energy use of commercial and industrial firms. The regulation imposes higher user prices during hours when electricity is generally more expensive to produce, and is the most common way for time-varying incentives to be transmitted to retail electricity customers. We exploit a natural experiment that arises from the rules governing the program to present evidence that TOU pricing induced negligible change in overall usage, peak usage or peak load. As such, economic efficiency was not increased by this regulation. Bill levels and volatility exhibit only minor shifts, suggesting that concerns from advocacy groups about increased expenditure and customer risk exposure have been overstated.http://kkjessoe.ucdavis.edu/Research.htm.About the Speaker:Katrina Jessoe is  an assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Davis, where she specializes in environmental and energy economics. Much of her research centers on the design and evaluation of water regulations and time variant pricing in electricity markets. In her work, she often collaborates with electric and water utilities, as well as state agencies. Some recent and ongoing projects include the design of a randomized field experiment to test the role of information on the price elasticity for residential electricity, the analysis of time-variant pricing programs for residential and commercial electricity customers, and the collection of water quality data from public and state small systems to measure the impact of drinking water quality regulations in California. She received a BA from Princeton University in 2002 and a PhD in Environmental and Resource Economics from Yale University if 2009.Please see Professor Jessoe’s website for more information.