Abstract
Targets for reductions in carbon emissions and energy use are often framed solely in terms of percentage reductions. However, the amount of energy used by households varies greatly, with some using considerably more than others and, therefore, potentially being able to make a bigger contribution towards overall reductions. Using two recently released UK datasets based on combined readings from over 70 million domestic energy meters and vehicle odometers, we present exploratory analyses of patterns of direct household energy usage.Whilst much energy justice work has previously focussed on energy vulnerability, mainly in low consumers, our findings suggest that a minority of areas appear to be placing much greater strain on energy networks and environmental systems than they need. Households in these areas are not only the most likely to be able to afford energy efficiency measures to reduce their impacts, but are also found to have other capabilities that would allow them to take action to reduce consumption (such as higher levels of income, education and particular configurations of housing type and tenure). We argue that these areas should therefore be a higher priority in the targeting of policy interventions.
Highlights
Energy justice is a relatively recent and rapidly growing field of research [5,41]
We argue that due to very large disparities in household energy consumption, households with very high levels of consumption ought to be a greater target of early energy/carbon reduction policies as this should enable both larger overall reductions in energy use to be achieved quickly as well as potentially allowing relatively easy wins compared to households who already consume little
We widen the consideration of most energy justice work on domestic energy consumption to include energy use from private household vehicles, with regard to looking ahead to the increasing electrification of transport and an increase in energy for vehicles being sourced from domestic electricity supplies
Summary
Energy justice is a relatively recent and rapidly growing field of research [5,41]. It bears much relation to environmental justice, which as a concept, is seen as beginning in 1982 in the US with the objection by “communities of colour” in Warren County, North Carolina to the siting of hazardous waste landfill sites in their localities [52]. The focus of environmental justice work in the US has tended towards the unjust spatial relationships between particular social or ethnic groups and locations of industrial and waste sites, and the lack of public engagement with these minority groups. Energy justice work to date has, tended to focus on two main areas. With a clear link to much previous work on environmental justice, is the work around the siting of energy generation [37,18]) Within energy justice, this takes an interesting development with consideration not just of major infrastructure, as has been the focus of much environmen-
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