The Hard-to-Reach Energy Users Task presented two publications at the 2024 ACEEE Summer Study.
The first, titled “Addressing Energy Hardship By Putting Communities at the Center – Comparative Approaches in Aotearoa New Zealand, the United States, and Canada” provided an overview of just transition programmes and approaches in our Task participating countries. Its focus was particularly on community engagement, which is the main theme of Subtask 5 in Phase 2 of this Task.
The second publication, titled “How do Small and Medium Businesses Understand and Respond to TOU Rates?“, for which we partnered with the See Change Institute and Uplight, delves into one extremely hard-to-reach (practically, ‘hidden’) energy user category, namely small to medium businesses (SMBs). We undertook qualitative research delving into how much American SMBs understood about utility demand response programmes such as time-of-use (TOU) rates. This expands our understanding, segmentation and characterisation of hidden energy user categories in Subtask 2 of Phase 2.
