Mirabelle Muûls
Imperial College Business School
Shifting Household Power Demand Across Time: Incentives and Automation
Monday, November 16, 2026 –05:15 – 06:30 PM (CET)
This session will be held as a hybrid event. To join in person, you can come to room O 133 (i.e., room 133 on level 1 of the east wing of the castle). The Zoom link for the event can be found here.
Seminar Abstract
Integrating intermittent renewable generation on the path to net zero requires flexible electricity demand. In a randomized controlled trial in urban India, we provide households with simple Wi-Fi-enabled smart switches that control a single appliance. We then trigger automated switch-off events and reward participants for each unit of electricity they avoid consuming during an event, effectively paying them for the power they free up. Using data from nearly 1,000 households, we find that switch-off events reduce appliance-level electricity use by 60% and household-level use by 8.5% during the event. The reduction is larger during hours of peak demand. Comparing household-level and appliance-level consumption, we find no evidence of leakage, where users shift consumption to appliances not linked to the switch. Nor do we find evidence of load shifting on average, implying that switch-offs reduce total consumption rather than displace it. Combining new estimates of marginal emission factors with high-resolution generation cost data, we show that optimally timed, automated switch-offs could deliver meaningful emission reductions at low or even negative cost.
Speaker Bio
Dr Mirabelle Muûls is an Associate Professor in Economics at the Imperial College Business School, a co-Director of the School of Convergence Science – Sustainability and co-Director of the Hitachi-Imperial Centre for Decarbonisation and Natural Climate Solutions. She was a lecturer at the Grantham Institute and the academic director of the MSc Climate Change, Management and Finance. She is also a Research Associate in the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, a Research Fellow at the National Bank of Belgium, and in the International Trade and Regional Economics programme of CEPR.
Her current research focuses on the economics of climate change, seeking in particular to understand the impact of climate change policies and climate change on firms' emissions, energy efficiency, innovation, competitiveness and performance. She is also analysing households’ energy demand, their behavioural response to different incentives and their flexibility, through the analysis of smart meter data and randomised control trials. Her research interests also cover international trade and globalisation. Mirabelle studied economics at the FUSL and UCLouvain in Belgium, and holds an MSc in Politics of the World Economy and a PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics.
She previously held Imperial College Junior Research Fellowship. In 2019, she received the Imperial College President's medal for Excellence in Education. and the Finance for the Future awards for “Climate Leadership” and “Driving Change through Education and Academia”. In 2015, she was awarded together with her colleagues the Erik Kempe Award in Environmental and Resource Economics for their publication in the American Economic Review, “Industry Compensation Under Relocation Risk: A Firm-Level Analysis of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme” whilst in 2014 she received jointly with her co-author the Robert Mundell Prize.
Admission information
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