Demand-Side Management Policy: Failure and Transferability

Mr Peter Warren, UCL Energy Institute

Overview:

Demand-side management (DSM) policy includes both energy efficiency and demand response and is becoming increasingly topical around the world due to energy security issues. Previous research has looked at what works, but not the mechanisms behind how and why certain government policies succeed or fail, and the transferability of best practices between countries.

Methodology:

This paper presents the full results of a PhD, which undertook a systematic review of the global evidence over the last forty years from DSM policy evaluations across academic, industrial and government databases, to synthesise the mechanisms behind success and failure for specific policies. The systematic review is triangulated with Multi-Criteria Decision-Making analysis with key DSM policy experts.

Results:

The research covered 27 countries on six continents. The full results are currently being analysed but preliminary results show that the three most successful policies globally are performance standards, utility obligations and fiscal measures. The two least successful policies globally are information campaigns and labelling. However, policy packages have shown some success in improving the effectiveness of information campaigns and labelling policies, though they often perform poorly if implemented as stand-alone policies.

Conclusions:

Success is primarily determined by regulatory support and the programme funding mechanism, but five further factors that appear to be important are the involvement of stakeholders, having clear policy aims and goals, a clear definition of roles, policy flexibility and continuity, and political support. Full results on the mechanisms and the transferability of successful policies will be available by the time of the conference.