In recent years, demand response (DR) has gained increased attention from utilities, regulators, and market aggregators to meet the growing demands of electricity. DR programs rely on data based decisions to bring a balance between the electricity demand and supply. The key aspect of a successful DR program is the effective processing of data for information to gain critical insights. This research draws upon the broad framework of energy informatics and seeks to understand information processing in electricity demand response systems. The main purpose of this study is two-fold: (I) understand DR effectiveness by developing an information processing view (II) analyse the impact of DR pricing information on residential consumers’ based on the concepts of behavioural economics.

As information and communications technology evolved, stakeholders faced various challenges characterized by uncertainties like the enhancement of existing networks to deliver reliable and quality power, integration of distributed energy resources, and improvement of energy analytics providing valuable insights. Against this background, the present study aims to characterize information processing needs and information processing capacity to achieve the desired DR effectiveness. This research uses organizational information processing theory (OIPT) to understand the role of Information Systems resources in achieving desired DR program performance.

Information plays a major role in driving the behavioral changes in energy consumption, and success of DR mainly relies on consumers’ participation and their response to DR strategies. Consumer engagement efforts in DR include different informational and structural intervention strategies - incentivizing or penalizing the energy consumers along with dynamic tariffing. Price based DR is a promising way to manage demand by communicating pricing information to the consumers and incentivize them for reducing their peak demand. The present work examines how do information intervention strategies that motivate the behavioral changes in the energy consumers, impact DR program outcomes. This research applies behavioral science principles to study the effect of informational interventions to manage residential DR.