Time-based rate programs 1 , enabled by utility investments in advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), are increasingly being considered by utilities as tools to reduce peak demand and enable customers to better manage consumption and costs. There are several customer systems that are relatively new to the marketplace and have the potential for improving the effectiveness of these programs, including in-home displays (IHDs), programmable communicating thermostats (PCTs), and web portals. Policy and decision makers are interested in more information about customer acceptance, retention, and response before moving forward with expanded deployments of AMI-enabled new rates and technologies. volunteers. We observed benefit-cost ratios greater than 2.0 for opt-out and between 0.7 and 2.0 for opt-in, depending on rate and technology combination. 4 Prices versus Rebates-Effects of CPP and CPR The behavioral science theory of loss aversion states that when people are presented with a choice that involves the potential of either avoiding a loss or acquiring a gain, the strong preference is to avoid the loss rather than to acquire the gain. As a result, one would expect that customers would be more likely to enroll in and remain on CPR than CPP. The perceived risk of receiving higher bills from under performance during critical events under CPP is greater than under CPR, and this could be a motivating factor that decreases enrollment and retention for CPP. However, once customers are on a rate, because the risk of potential loss from CPP is more salient than the potential gain from CPR, customers are expected to respond more to CPP. Results from the CBS utilities support this theory as retention rates were higher for CPR (89%) than for CPP (80%) and demand reductions were generally higher for CPP (21%) than for CPR (11%), whereas the variability in average demand reductions across events was less for CPP than it was for CPR. However, when PCTs were available as an automated control strategy, the differences in average peak demand reductions between CPP and CPR were largely eliminated. This suggests that regardless of the financial incentive to respond (i.e., acquiring a gain via a rebate or avoiding a loss via pricing), PCTs can be an effective tool to mitigate a customer's loss aversion by allowing them to automate their response during the critical peak events.

Recent improvements to advanced water metering and communications technologies have the potential to improve the management of water resources and utility infrastructure, benefiting both utilities and ratepayers. The highly granular, near-real-time data and opportunity for automated control provided by these advanced systems may yield operational benefits similar to those afforded by similar technologies in the energy sector. While significant progress has been made in quantifying the water-related benefits of these technologies, the research on quantifying the energy benefits of improved water metering is underdeveloped. Some studies have quantified the embedded energy in water in California, however these findings are based on data more than a decade old, and unanimously assert that more research is needed to further explore how topography, climate, water source, and other factors impact their findings. In this report, we show how water-related advanced metering systems may present a broader and more significant set of energy-related benefits. We review the open literature of water-related advanced metering technologies and their applications, discuss common themes with a series of water and energy experts, and perform a preliminary scoping analysis of advanced water metering deployment and use in California. We find that the open literature provides very little discussion of the energy savings potential of advanced water metering, despite the substantial energy necessary for water's extraction, conveyance, treatment, distribution, and eventual end use. We also find that water AMI has the potential to provide waterenergy co-efficiencies through improved water systems management, with benefits including improved customer education, automated leak detection, water measurement and verification, optimized system operation, and inherent water and energy conservation. Our findings also suggest that the adoption of these technologies in the water sector has been slow, due to structural economic and regulatory barriers. In California, we see examples of deployed advanced metering systems with demonstrated embedded energy savings through water conservation and leak detection. We also see substantial untapped opportunity in the agricultural sector for enabling electric demand response for both traditional peak shaving and more complex flexible and ancillary services through improved water tracking and farm automation.