Many energy policies are implemented to subsidize the adoption of energy efficiency. However, when private benefits from energy efficiency exceed the social benefits, there is an incentive for the consumers to over-invest in energy efficiency; otherwise, there is an incentive to under-invest. This study adds to this discussion by providing an empirical estimation of the electricity savings and social benefits after energy efficiency retrofits for consumers on time-of-use (TOU) and increasing block pricing, respectively. We aim to examine how social versus private savings from a given energy efficiency measure may be different depending on different pricing plans. This study applies hourly electricity data for about 16,000 residential consumers during 2013–2017 in Arizona. We show that for the TOU consumers, the private savings from energy-efficient AC retrofits are greater than the social savings by 61%, while the increasing block rate consumers’ private savings exceed the social savings by 46%, when other market failures are not considered (e.g., principal-agent problem and imperfect information). Different rate plans impose different marginal electricity prices which influence the incentives to invest in energy efficiency as well as electricity consumption behaviors that can influence both the private and social savings from energy efficiency. The result indicates that there should be potentially different levels of policy interventions towards energy efficiency for consumers on different pricing. Additionally, we also find that energy efficiency makes the electricity demand more elastic to price changes.

实施了许多能源政策来补贴采用能源效率。但是，当能效带来的私人利益超过社会利益时，就会促使消费者过度投资于能效；否则，存在投资不足的诱因。这项研究通过分别对使用时间（TOU）和增加的大宗电价对消费者进行能源效率改造后的节电和社会效益的经验估计来增加此讨论。我们旨在研究根据给定的能源效率衡量标准，社会储蓄与私人储蓄之间的差异，具体取决于不同的定价计划。这项研究应用了2013-2017年亚利桑那州约16,000名居民消费者的每小时用电量数据。我们表明，对于TOU消费者来说，在不考虑其他市场失灵的情况下（例如，委托代理问题），高能效空调改造所产生的私人储蓄比社会储蓄大61％，而封堵率不断提高的消费者的私人储蓄超过社会储蓄46％。和不完善的信息）。不同的费率计划会施加不同的边际电价，这会影响对提高能效的投资动机，以及会影响能效方面的私人和社会储蓄的用电行为。结果表明，应该以不同的价格针对消费者的能源效率采取不同级别的政策干预措施。此外，我们还发现，能源效率使电力需求对价格变化更具弹性。