The untold subtlety of energy consumption and its influence on policy drive towards Sustainable Development Goal 7

Abstract

The Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG 7, Affordable and Clean Energy) is the key to achieving climate goals and constructing effective policies have an immense role to foster the actions. The three major components of SDG 7 include energy accessibility, renewable penetration and energy intensity. Energy consumption characteristics in a country can predominantly influence all three components of SDG 7. Further, energy consumption is intrinsically linked to several energy policies. Understanding the nexuses will be conducive to the policymakers and energy community. This study aims at providing deeper perspectives on the influence of energy consumption by analyzing the changes incurred in renewable penetration, energy installed capacity, production and consumption-based emission, and emission intensity. The analysis is extended to four major energy consuming sectors (including industrial, transportation, residential and commercial sectors) in 40 countries. A thorough investigation is performed based on a clustering approach to identify the pattern among the energy consumption. This yielded three scenarios where countries have the highest energy consumption in the industrial (Scenario 1), transportation (Scenario 2), and residential sector (Scenario 3), respectively. Scenario 1 has higher energy consumption growth and renewable penetration can be achieved with a proper policy framework. Scenario 2 is observed to have stagnant energy consumption and promoting renewables needs additional efforts to decouple fossil fuel usage. Scenario 3 has moderate energy consumption growth and the renewable penetration is the highest. The residential sector is observed to possess the highest renewable energy consumption among the four energy-consuming sectors in all the scenarios. For the identified energy consumption patterns, a policy framework is proposed to substantiate energy sustainability in which policies are constructed in two stages, i.e., one to form the core policy and the other to sustain the core policy. The contributions of the study is further extended to delineate the relation between energy consumption and the three elements of SDG 7 (energy accessibility, renewable penetration, and energy intensity). Understanding the influence exerted by energy consumption patterns will be highly supportive in directing energy policies and the existing policies can be optimized with the findings of this study.