With the increased deployment of advanced meters with two‐way communication networks that can record and provide at least hourly interval data, electric utilities are now able to more easily offer and implement time‐based rate and enabling technology programs for residential and smaller commercial customers. These time‐based rate programs are fairly new for residential customers, and utilities, with some exceptions, have had limited success in enrolling mass market customers on these tariffs. Because AMI business cases often rely on the benefits from customer demand response enabled by these investments, there is increasing interest among policymakers, regulators, utilities and stakeholders in understanding how many customers are likely to enroll and continue in such a program, and which factors can affect these recruitment and retention rates.

While there have been numerous evaluations of the peak demand and energy impacts of time‐based rate programs (e,.g., Critical Peak Pricing) and enabling technology (e.g., programmable communicating thermostats), there has been limited examination to date of the customer recruitment rates that these types of programs can achieve.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) both collect and report on time‐based rate enrollment information from all utilities in the United States on an annual basis. However, it is difficult to interpret this data or analyze results across utilities because utilities are not required to report information on the number of customers that were solicited or provide information that may explain factors that influenced their recruitment rates. As such, there is limited information in the public sphere that could help utilities, regulators or other policymakers understand what reasonable recruitment rates wand what may explain currently observed differences in recruitment rates.

In this preliminary report, we begin to fill this need by providing an initial summary of experiences of the different phases of the enrollment process (qualification, solicitation, recruitment, and selection) across nine of the ten SGIG utilities, who collectively are undertaking a total of 11 consumer behavior studies . We report. We report three findings: Experimental Results, Descriptive Results, and Lessons Learned. findings: Experimental Results, Descriptive Results, and Lessons Learned.