Promoting Conservation by Managing Residential Outdoor Watering: Evidence from the Truckee Meadows Area in Northern Nevada

When

to

Where

Dr. Moeltner is a candidate for the advertised position, Associate Director, WRRC, and Associate Professor, AREC. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Resource Economics at the University of Nevada, Reno. His expertise is in applied econometrics with research experience in water and energy. He has a Ph.D. in economics from University of Washington. Abstract: Many water utilities in the US and around the world have implemented days-of-week outdoor watering restrictions to induce conservation and delay costly capacity expansions. While there is some evidence that such restrictions reduce use compared to a completely unrestricted case, there still exists considerable uncertainty regarding the optimal number of weekly watering days, or the impact of allowing customers to choose their watering days within the weekly quota.  This study takes a closer look at the relationship between weekly watering days, total weekly consumption, and weekly usage peaks using panel data on daily water consumption at the household level.  We tackle the multiple econometric challenges of a discrete-continuous, triple equation system with endogenous regressors and unobserved household effects via a full-information hierarchical Bayesian framework.  We find that while consumption and peaks generally increase with the number of watering days, households that exhibit weekly flexibility in their choice of watering days have significantly lower use. Klaus Moeltner & Anita Castledine, UNR; Michael K. Price, University of Tennessee; Shawn Stoddard, Truckee Meadows Water Authority.