Estimation of city energy consumption in China based on downscaling energy balance tables

Abstract

The accurate estimation of city-level energy consumption is of great significance for the formulation of energy conservation and emission reduction policies and for addressing global climate change. Previous studies can only provide the estimation of the total energy consumption rather than energy consumption by sector or energy type, and the estimation accuracy of these methods are rarely validated. Meanwhile, few studies on carbon emission accounting based on the energy balance table provide some enlightenment on energy consumption estimation by sector. However, these studies suffer from the problems of incomplete distribution indicator systems and discrepancies between the provincial total and city-level aggregation data, resulting in inaccuracy. To address these challenges, in this study, a systematic accounting method based on downscaling energy balance tables is developed to estimate the energy consumption of prefecture-level cities in China. With this method, we compiled the energy consumption inventory of 286 cities in 2003–2019, covering 18 energy activities and 30 fossil fuels. To completely evaluate the performance of the proposed method, we also provided a comparison of the estimation results with the inversion simulation method by nighttime light data and the previous top-bottom allocation method. The comparison results reveal that the proposed method outperforms all the other approaches with a small average error, better stability and higher accuracy. Overall, this method provides an effective way to obtain continuous, long-term and full-coverage energy consumption data in cities, which provides reliable data support for the formulation of rational energy conservation and emission reduction policies at the city level.