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Small businesses are typically committed to providing a positive customer experience and therefore may exhibit a response to dynamic electricity prices different from residential or industrial customers. We conduct a field experiment to determine the extent to which small businesses respond through re-configuration of typical routines throughout the experiment period versus through adjustments to specific dynamic pricing events. Using a customer-level survey of appliance ownership, we estimate the hourly response patterns of individual appliances to participation in the experiment versus individual dynamic pricing events. Consistent with our re-configuration hypothesis, small businesses primarily curtail electricity usage throughout the experiment period, although we also find a small imprecisely estimated response to dynamic pricing events on top of the re-configuration effect. Appliances not critical to a positive customer experience such as dish dryers, food storage units, lights, electric motors & pumps, and industrial heaters are the major sources of the energy savings from the re-configuration actions of these small businesses.

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• Reference Manager
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Using hourly offer curves from the Italian day-ahead market and the real-time re-dispatch market for the period January 1, 2017 to December 31, 2018, we show how thermal generation unit owners are able to profit from differences between a simplified day-ahead market design that ignores system security constraints as well as generation unit operating constraints, and real-time system operation where these constraints must be respected. We find that thermal generation unit owners increase or decrease their day-ahead offer prices depending on the probability that their final output will be increased or decreased relative to their day-ahead schedules because of real-time operating constraints. First, we estimate generation unit-level models of the probability of each of these outcomes conditional on forecast demand and renewable production in Italy and neighboring countries. Our most conservative estimate of the impact of a change in the probability a unit owner will have its day-ahead schedule increased in the real-time re-dispatch market implies a day-ahead offer price increase of 5 EUR/MWh if this probability changes by 0.1. If the probability of a day-ahead schedule decrease rises by 0.1 the unit owner's offer price is predicted to be 6 EUR/MWh less. Over our sample period, we find that the economic re-dispatch cost averaged approximately 15% of the total cost of energy consumption valued at the day-ahead price.