Abstract
Growing household energy demand, particularly in developing countries starting from a low base of consumption, is an important driver of current and future greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, our understanding of transitioning residential energy demand in developing country contexts is limited. This paper discusses changing energy service demands in urban low-income households in India, an emerging economy where the largest future growth in energy demand globally is projected to occur, and where 12 million new low-income homes for the urban poor are to be built by the government between 2015 and 2022. Based on mixed quantitative and qualitative methods comprising of surveys, interviews and focus group discussions, we analyze two inter-related questions: how does the demand for energy services change as the ability of low-income households to consume increases; and how do energy related behaviors influence household electricity consumption? We analyze the data collected to rank households according to their ability to consume and to identify the types of, and progression in, energy services acquired. The appliances and associated services pursued are lights, fans, televisions, and refrigerators, with varied energy efficiencies. Analogously, we quantify the influence of behavior in determining electricity consumption, and show that the inclusion of socio-demographic and behavioral factors explain a significant proportion (51%) of the variance in household electricity consumption, along with the role of material factors such as building physical characteristics and appliance stocks. We complement the statistical analysis with qualitative fieldwork and discuss changing energy related behaviors as the ability of households to consume increases. We conclude with recommendations for climate actions that are compatible with development in the growing low-income housing stock.
Highlights
As economies develop, households gain the ability to consume more energy services, and in turn reconfigure national energy demand patterns (Reddy 1991, Wolfram et al 2012, Royston et al 2018)
Based on mixed quantitative and qualitative methods comprising of surveys, interviews and focus group discussions, we analyze two inter-related questions: how does the demand for energy services change as the ability of low-income households to consume increases; and how do energy related behaviors influence household electricity consumption? We analyze the data collected to rank households according to their ability to consume and to identify the types of, and progression in, energy services acquired
Climbing the energy services ladder with changing appliance ownership we examine how appliance ownership changes with the increased ability of households to consume
Summary
Households gain the ability to consume more energy services, and in turn reconfigure national energy demand patterns (Reddy 1991, Wolfram et al 2012, Royston et al 2018). Most of the growth in future household energy demand is projected to be in urban areas in developing countries, with large implications for climate change (Bai et al 2018). Transitions in household energy demand can be opportunities to lock-in low carbon consumption patterns (Creutzig et al 2016, Creutzig 2018, Seto et al 2016). Our understanding of changing energy use patterns and the feasibility of achieving low-carbon residential demand in developing country contexts is partial because of the lack of data on energy use and related behaviors (Bai et al 2018, Nagendra et al 2018, Steg 2018). The integration of technical, economic, and sociocultural factors in the research on residential energy consumption and climate change remains limited (Wijaya and Tezuka 2013, Lutzenhiser 2014, Sovacool 2014, Schmidt and Weigt 2015, Sovacool et al 2015, Stern et al 2016, Hu et al 2017, Abrahamse and Shwom 2018, Khalid and Sunikka-Blank 2018, Romero-Lankao et al 2018, Sunikka-Blank et al 2019). The gap is true for the research on developing countries and for scales larger than individual buildings (Zhang et al 2018), where the rapidly transforming built environment will have significant longterm impacts on infrastructure, energy, and GHG emissions (Bredenoord et al 2014, Charoenkit and Kumar 2014, Seto et al 2016)
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