Stationarity and cycles in the energy consumption in the United States

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is twofold: analyzing stationarity of energy consumption by source in the United States and studying their cycles and pairwise synchronization. We study a panel of nine time series of monthly energy consumption for the period 1973–2022. Four of the series (namely coal, natural gas, petroleum, and nuclear electric power consumption) are non-renewables, whereas the remaining ones (hydroelectric power, geothermal, biomass, solar, and wind energy consumption) are renewable energy sources. We employ a nonparametric, panel stationarity testing approach. The results indicate that most of the series may be trend-stationarity, with nuclear and geothermal energy consumption being the only exceptions. Additionally, a study on potential cycles in the series of energy consumption by source is carried out, and subsequently we analyze pairwise concordance between states of different energy sources and between states of energy sources and the business cycle. Significant correlations are detected in the latter analysis, which are positive in the case of fossil fuel sources and negative for two renewable sources, namely geothermal and biomass energy consumption.