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Main Authors: Sitaraman, Anupama, Lechowicz, Adam, Bashir, Noman, Liu, Xutong, Hajiesmaili, Mohammad, Shenoy, Prashant
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.08877
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author Sitaraman, Anupama
Lechowicz, Adam
Bashir, Noman
Liu, Xutong
Hajiesmaili, Mohammad
Shenoy, Prashant
author_facet Sitaraman, Anupama
Lechowicz, Adam
Bashir, Noman
Liu, Xutong
Hajiesmaili, Mohammad
Shenoy, Prashant
contents Greenhouse gas emissions from the residential sector represent a significant fraction of global emissions. Governments and utilities have designed incentives to stimulate the adoption of decarbonization technologies such as rooftop PV and heat pumps. However, studies have shown that many of these incentives are inefficient since a substantial fraction of spending does not actually promote adoption, and incentives are not equitably distributed across socioeconomic groups. We present a novel data-driven approach that adopts a holistic, emissions-based and city-scale perspective on decarbonization. We propose an optimization model that dynamically allocates a total incentive budget to households to directly maximize city-wide carbon reduction. We leverage techniques for the multi-armed bandits problem to estimate human factors, such as a household's willingness to adopt new technologies given a certain incentive. We apply our proposed framework to a city in the Northeast U.S., using real household energy data, grid carbon intensity data, and future price scenarios. We show that our learning-based technique significantly outperforms an example status quo incentive scheme, achieving up to 32.23% higher carbon reductions. We show that our framework can accommodate equity-aware constraints to equitably allocate incentives across socioeconomic groups, achieving 78.84% of the carbon reductions of the optimal solution on average.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_08877
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Dynamic Incentive Allocation for City-scale Deep Decarbonization
Sitaraman, Anupama
Lechowicz, Adam
Bashir, Noman
Liu, Xutong
Hajiesmaili, Mohammad
Shenoy, Prashant
Computers and Society
Greenhouse gas emissions from the residential sector represent a significant fraction of global emissions. Governments and utilities have designed incentives to stimulate the adoption of decarbonization technologies such as rooftop PV and heat pumps. However, studies have shown that many of these incentives are inefficient since a substantial fraction of spending does not actually promote adoption, and incentives are not equitably distributed across socioeconomic groups. We present a novel data-driven approach that adopts a holistic, emissions-based and city-scale perspective on decarbonization. We propose an optimization model that dynamically allocates a total incentive budget to households to directly maximize city-wide carbon reduction. We leverage techniques for the multi-armed bandits problem to estimate human factors, such as a household's willingness to adopt new technologies given a certain incentive. We apply our proposed framework to a city in the Northeast U.S., using real household energy data, grid carbon intensity data, and future price scenarios. We show that our learning-based technique significantly outperforms an example status quo incentive scheme, achieving up to 32.23% higher carbon reductions. We show that our framework can accommodate equity-aware constraints to equitably allocate incentives across socioeconomic groups, achieving 78.84% of the carbon reductions of the optimal solution on average.
title Dynamic Incentive Allocation for City-scale Deep Decarbonization
topic Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.08877