Household appliance prioritization under limited access to electricity – A stated preference approach

Lars Persson^1,2 and Adan L. Martinez-Cruz^3,2

¹Umeå School of Business, Umeå University, Sweden, ²Centre for Environmental and Resource Economics, Sweden, ³Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden

Energy issues are high on the political agenda and along the transition towards renewable sources and the increased industrial- and household electrification, the current geopolitical situation puts even more pressure on energy systems. Restricted electricity supply has become a realistic scenario also for high-income economies and rationing may become a reality in peak demand hours. The need and expectation for demand side management is high and the overall trust in consumer flexibility is promising. Whether households can flexibly decide their use of electricity remains largely unexplored and, despite a growing literature on demand flexibility, there is still little known about distributional justice, equality and fairness aspects of household behavior.

Households have varying possibilities to respond to flexibility promoting incentives. The gendered organization of everyday life has implications for the potential of flexibility, but also the justice and equality aspects implied by flexibility through change in habits, etc. Traditionally, cooking, laundry, cleaning, etc. are more often women responsibilities, while car maintenance, charging, etc. are more often performed by men. Imagine doing laundry while waiting for the dinner to cook, or making more than one dish at the time to be more “time efficient”. With limited access to electricity (load), this is perhaps not possible and household duties need to be done at another time. This could both increase and decrease justice and equality depending on whether duties are shared or not within the household. It is important to know more about how the prioritization among appliances (duties) change when put under pressure from constraints, which also play a role for the willingness to accept constraints.

In a questionnaire, 2,000 Swedish residents reported how often on a weekly basis they use several pre-specified and representative high-power household appliances. Appliances under consideration were mainly for cooking, cleaning, and washing – as well as electrical tools, hair dryer, sauna, etc. (23 appliances). Our protocol describes three hypothetical scenarios were respondents position themselves in a situation with load restrictions during weekday peak demand hours (5.30-6pm). The constrained scenarios took values of 5000, 3500 and 2000 watts of maximum total load. Respondents were asked to choose appliances given the restrictions and had to redo the prioritization if they surpassed the limit. Indeed, the hypothetical nature of the scenarios has its limitations but, to our knowledge, no other previous study explores this topic on neither real-life nor stated-preferences data.

We identify six types of respondents based on whether they choose appliances categorized by most-, less- and least demanded – and whether they choose different appliances with stricter constraints. We visualize the substitution patterns across appliances and constrained scenarios. Respondents seem to be flexibly substituting appliances as they move to more constrained scenarios – most demanded appliances may become less demanded when moving from 5000 to 3500-watt scenario. Results also show that if appliances are classified by chores they are used in – e.g., cooking versus cleaning/washing — a less flexible pattern is observed. Only to a certain degree they substitute cooking for cleaning/washing activities. Given the substitution between cleaning and washing activities, we run a recursive bivariate probit model to identify respondent characteristics explaining substitution between cooking and washing/cleaning. We are currently exploring highly interesting components of our study, where preliminary results indicate e.g., that those more likely to substitute cooking for cleaning/washing are younger, single males.

To conclude, during peak hours respondents are not particularly flexible in cooking or cleaning/washing appliances. A nuance is that, when more constrained in total load, respondents substitute among appliances for cooking (e.g., give up stove for microwave) and to lesser degree among cooking appliances and cleaning/appliances.