Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Prepaid Metering and Electricity Consumption in Developing Countries

I've written an Energy Insight policy brief for the EEG Programme with my PhD student Debasish Das on prepaid metering and its effect on electricity consumption.

The bottom line is that consumers who are switched to prepaid metering significantly reduce their electricity consumption. 

Debasish is working on a study of the effect of prepaid metering in Bangladesh and some preliminary results are in this paper. This graph shows the estimated difference in monthly electricity consumption between consumers in two areas of Dhaka, Bangladesh around the time that one group was switched to prepaid metering:

 
 
Electricity consumption in the treated group fell by 17%. This graph didn't make it into the final version of the paper, because it was deemed to be too mathy. Debasish has a very large dataset that he obtained from the Bangladesh electric utilities. He's still working on getting this into a usable form. But hopefully we will have some more results soon.

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