Exploring bill affordability for low income electricity customers in California

Last registered on May 29, 2023

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Exploring bill affordability for low income electricity customers in California
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0007354
Initial registration date
March 15, 2021

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
March 16, 2021, 6:38 AM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Last updated
May 29, 2023, 12:11 PM EDT

Last updated is the most recent time when changes to the trial's registration were published.

Locations

Region

Primary Investigator

Affiliation
UC Berkeley

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Affiliation
UC Berkeley

Additional Trial Information

Status
Completed
Start date
2021-04-19
End date
2023-04-01
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic and economic recession have made it challenging for many customers to pay their bills on time. Utilities across the country have adopted a number of short-term solutions to assist customers with bill payment, often allowing customers to temporarily accumulate debts. While these interventions offered much-needed short-term assistance, they are unsustainable in the long term. When the crisis ends, it remains an open question which policy levers should be pushed to effectively help utility customers recover from their accumulated debts. In this project, we will work with a public power agency in California, East Bay Community Energy, to run randomized experiments that will allow us to estimate how low-income customers respond to policies that reduce electricity prices and/or provide temporary debt relief. We will use standard economic methods to evaluate how each intervention changes customers’ behaviors in electricity bill payment, electricity consumption, and payment of other bills. Furthermore, we will explore what drives behavioral changes by considering treatment effect heterogeneity. The results of this study will provide insight into the mechanisms that drive utility customer behaviors in payment and consumption, as well as the policy instruments that will most effective in recovering from the current crisis.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Buchsbaum, Jesse and Meredith Fowlie. 2023. "Exploring bill affordability for low income electricity customers in California." AEA RCT Registry. May 29. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.7354-3.0
Sponsors & Partners

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Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
We run a Randomized Encouragement Design (RED) under the Arrearage Management Plan (AMP), a new California debt forgiveness program. Utility customers qualify if they are enrolled in the California Alternative Rates for Energy (CARE) program and have at least $500 in arrearages, with their oldest arrears at least 90 days old. For each month that an enrolled customer pays their full utility bill, 1/12 of their existing arrearages are forgiven. Hence, for a customer with $1200 in arrearages at the start of the program, $100 would be forgiven each month that the customer pays their electricity and gas bill.
Intervention Start Date
2021-10-01
Intervention End Date
2022-11-01

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
Our primary outcome variables include electricity consumption (kWh), 0-30 day electricity bill arrearages, 31-60 day electricity bill arrearages, 61-90 electricity bill day arrearages, 91-120 electricity bill day arrearages, and total electricity bill arrearages.
Primary Outcomes (explanation)
Payment of other types of bills ($), loan behaviors, and credit scores.

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
We run a Randomized Encouragement Design, where we expend some encouragement effort to educate potential participants about the pilot program (such as phone calls, fliers, customer outreach). Random assignment of this encouragement can generate random variation in who takes up the program. More specifically, targeting a randomly selected subset of eligible households with strong encouragement/targeted outreach can significantly increase participation among the encouraged group. This provides a basis for highly credibly causal inference, allowing us to isolate the causal impacts on outcomes of interest (e.g. arrears and consumption).
Experimental Design Details
Randomization Method
Randomization will be done using sampling in R.
Randomization Unit
The unit of randomization is a household.
Was the treatment clustered?
No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
~15,000 households (subject to change depending on the number of eligible customers)
Sample size: planned number of observations
~15,000 households (subject to change depending on the number of eligible customers)
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
~7,500 households treatment, ~7,500 households control (subject to change depending on the number of eligible customers)
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
Consumption - 23 kWh (5% of mean consumption) 0-30 day electricity bill arrearages - $10 (24.9% of mean) 31-60 day electricity bill arrearages - $10 (31.8% of mean) 61-90 day electricity bill arrearages - $10 (38.8% of mean) 91-120 day electricity bill arrearages - $10 (47.5% of mean) Total electricity bill arrearages - $10 (5.2% of mean)
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
University of California Berkeley Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects
IRB Approval Date
2021-01-06
IRB Approval Number
2020-06-13347
Analysis Plan

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Post-Trial

Post Trial Information

Study Withdrawal

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Intervention

Is the intervention completed?
No
Data Collection Complete
Data Publication

Data Publication

Is public data available?
No

Program Files

Program Files
Reports, Papers & Other Materials

Relevant Paper(s)

Reports & Other Materials