Residential responses to service-specific electricity demand: Case of China

Abstract

Understanding the diversity of the residential demand for various electrical services is critical for utilities and policymakers in conducting effective demand side management and narrowing urban-rural inequality. Previous research has usually treated the household as a unit of analysis, and thus may have ignored the fact that household electricity consumption is derived demand driven by specific services, which fails to examine the heterogeneous behavioral responses. Therefore, this paper presents a new pattern of residential demand for various electrical services and quantifies the impacts of socioeconomic determinants in China. The conditional demand analysis is performed on the unique dataset of the Chinese Residential Energy Consumption Survey of 2014 to estimate the electricity demand distribution in eight types of services and to investigate the effect of socioeconomic variables on service-specific electricity consumption. The results show that, together, entertainment and food refrigeration account for about half of the total annual electricity consumption, followed by laundry, lighting, space cooling, and hot water. Rural households use about 7.2% of total electricity for cooking purposes, while urban counterparts hardly use electricity to cook at all. Electricity consumption for space heating is negligible for both urban and rural households. Heterogeneity in socioeconomic determinants is found not only among different electrical services but also between urban and rural households.