Impacts of family household dynamics on residential energy demands in Hebei Province of China

Yi Zeng,Zhenglian Wang,Lan Li,Hanmo Yang

doi:10.1186/s41118-021-00148-0

Abstract

This article presents analyses and projections of the residential energy demands in Hebei Province of China, using the ProFamy extended cohort-component method and user-friendly free software and conventional demographic data as input. The results indicate that the future increase in residential energy demands will be dominated by large increase in small households with 1–2 persons. We found that increase of residential energy demands will be mainly driven by the rapid increase of older adults’ households. Comparisons between residential energy demand projections by household changes and by population changes demonstrate that projections by population changes seriously under-estimate the future residential energy demands. We recommend that China needs to adopt policies to encourage and facilitate older parents and adult children to live together or near-by, and support rural-to-urban family migration. Promoting inter-generation co-residence or living near-by between older parents and young adults would result in a mutually beneficial outcome for both older and younger generations as well as to effectively reduce energy demands. We suggest governments to carefully formulate strategies on efficient residential energy use to cope with the rapid households and population aging, and strengthen data collections/analyses on household residential energy demands for sound policy-making and sustainable development.

Highlights

Residential energy consumption is becoming a more and more important part of total energy consumptions in China and elsewhere
Note that this paper aims to provide a general profile of projections of the future trends of impacts of family household dynamics on residential energy demands, in the context of rapid population aging
The residential energy demands by household sizes, 2010–2050 Figure 2 indicates that the the highest relative increase of residential energy demands in 2050 as compared to 2010 is water, the is electricity and the third is fuel

Summary

Introduction

Residential energy consumption is becoming a more and more important part of total energy consumptions in China and elsewhere. It seems likely that the proportion of residential energy consumption will continue to increase alongside urbanization, income growth, development of industries, shrinking of household size and increase in the number of households in China and elsewhere. Hebei Province is in northeast China with a population of 75.92 million people in 2020 and median levels of socioeconomic development and urbanization. A recent study on 4899 older adults aged 60 + in Hebei Province showed that the proportion of the empty-nested older adults in rural areas was significantly higher than that in the urban areas, because many rural young people became migrant workers in the urban areas and left their old parents behind (Sun et al, 2020)

Objectives

Results

Conclusion