Accurate assessment of environmental externalities of particulate air pollution is crucial to the design and evaluation of environmental policies. Current evaluations mainly focus on direct damages resulting from exposure, missing indirect co-damages that occur through interactions among the externalities, human behaviours and technologies. Our study provides an empirical assessment of such co-damages using customer-level daily and hourly electricity data of a large sample of residential and commercial consumers in Arizona, United States. We use an instrumental variable panel regression approach and find that particulate matter air pollution increases electricity consumption in residential buildings as well as in retail and recreation service industries. Air pollution also reduces the actual electricity generated by distributed-solar panels. Lower-income and minority ethnic groups are disproportionally impacted by air pollution and pay higher electricity bills associated with pollution avoidance, stressing the importance of incorporating the consideration of environmental justice in energy policy-making.

准确评估微粒空气污染的环境外部性对于设计和评估环境政策至关重要。当前的评估主要集中在暴露造成的直接损害，缺少因外部性，人类行为和技术之间的相互作用而发生的间接共同损害。我们的研究使用美国亚利桑那州的大量居民和商业消费者的客户级别的每日和每小时用电数据，对此类共同破坏进行了实证评估。我们使用工具变量面板回归方法，发现颗粒物空气污染增加了住宅建筑以及零售和娱乐服务行业的电力消耗。空气污染还减少了分布式太阳能面板产生的实际电力。