Energy planners have long assumed that electricity demand will grow more price-responsive as metering, automation, and storage spread, an assumption now embedded in decarbonization plans. We test it against the entire empirical record: 4,898 own-price elasticity estimates from 482 studies, with data spanning 1934–2024, ranked on a single ladder of identification quality from naive regressions to randomized experiments. Three findings emerge. First, better-identified studies find smaller responses: the corrected short-run elasticity is about −0.16, and only −0.09 among the best-identified, design-based studies, whose adjusted value is statistically indistinguishable from zero. Second, responsiveness grows with time to adjust, roughly doubling from −0.16 in the short run to −0.38 in the long run as the capital stock turns over, but this pattern has itself been stable for decades. Third, and most important, responsiveness shows no upward trend across nine decades of data; if anything, the most technology-rich settings, including time-of-use pricing, are the least price-responsive in total consumption. Demand flexibility must be engineered and paid for; the historical record gives no reason to expect prices alone to deliver it.

Fig: Nine decades of estimates, and no visible drift



Each point is a reported own-price elasticity of electricity demand (winsorised at 1%), plotted against the mid-year of the underlying data and coloured by identification quality, from naive regressions (light) to design-based studies (dark blue); the 3,843 tier-classified estimates with usable standard errors are shown, with unclassified estimates omitted from the plot but retained in non-ladder analyses. Across ninety years the raw record shows no drift toward greater price responsiveness, and the best-identified, design-based studies — which arrive late and thin — point toward smaller, not larger, responses.


Reference: Irsova Zuzana, Havranek Tomas, Kudela Peter, Kudelova Anna, Sikl Vojtech (2026), “Electricity demand has not become more price-responsive despite ninety years of technological change.” Charles University, Prague. Available at meta-analysis.cz/electricity.